Like all the recent work by the artist and film-maker Andrew Kötting, this straddles the boundary between cinema and installation – and also, it should be said, the boundary between inspiration and dullness. There are moments of fascination and exasperation: in particular, I wasn’t sure about using archive footage that has been obviously “flipped” so that shopfront lettering, etc, is reversed. But in the end, Kötting will keep worming his way back into your imagination.

This film takes as its starting point Hattie Naylor’s 2010 play Ivan and the Dogs, which is based on the true story of “feral child” Ivan Mishukov, who in 1996, when he was four, fled an abusive mother and stepfather to live rough on the streets of Moscow for two years, before being recovered by police amid reports that he had been adopted by a pack of dogs and had even been promoted by them to pack leader. That, at any rate, was what Ivan remembered happening and the police certainly reported having to extricate the child from a growling pack of dogs.

Might this Mowgli/Kaspar Hauser story have been more complicated than that? Who knows? Kötting creates a complex collage of myths, memories and images with Xavier Tchili personifying this former wild child, now grown up, here renamed “Lek” and wandering in a desolate landscape of his own emotional anguish. (There was also a Lek in Kötting’s 2009 film Ivul, about a boy living a quasi-feral existence in the treetops.)

Russian dialogue is accompanied by ragged, Letraset-style subtitles. Voices intrude, like radio messages from the crackling ether: the voices trying to analyse Lek’s life and consciousness and what his connection with the world of animals really means for the rest of us. It is intriguing, perplexing, bemusing. I wonder what a more coldly sceptical documentary about Ivan Mishukov might look like.