Granted, I went into The Shaman Sorceress completely devoid of any expectations… but in its relatively brief 85 minutes, the film manages to swerve left when you think it’ll go right, and it continually bops and weaves as it plays with – and discards – any preconceived notions you might have. About the film. About the tropes you think it’s built on. About what’s “standard” and “expected” in animated films.

For this is a film that betrays easy classification. You’ll change your mind about what genre it is three or four times before it’s over. It’s a cultural, religious, musical ride that questions the strength of familial bonds and the power of personal belief. It is beautiful, contemplative, and suggestive, yet it also hints at incest, divine retribution, pedophilia, and filicide.

Directed by Ahn Jae-huun, The Shaman Sorceress was in competition at this year’s Annecy Festival in the Feature Film Contrechamp category, where it was awarded the Contrechamp Jury Distinction.

Based on a 1936 short story by Kim Tong-ni, the film is set in a hazily defined period of Korea’s history when feudalism and the country’s dynastic period finally came face to face with the “modern world” and Western (i.e., Christian) influences.

The film opens with an unnamed narrator describing the history of his household and the ups and downs of his grandfather’s fortune as a powerful patron of the arts. We center on his ancestral household, which was once a center for the arts, a hubbub of activity, and full of painters from all over Korea. Gradually, that all vanishes, and we witness the estate’s – and the grandfather’s – sad fade from glory. Traditional Korean painting (a rough stand-in for “traditional” Korean culture) is no longer valued and prized as it once was.

Into this comes a young deaf woman, Nang-yi, who is a somewhat accomplished painter and who gifts the old man a painting titled “The Shaman Sorceress.” We then dive into a flashback to her childhood, which lasts the rest of the movie. Though your immediate expectation is that the film will center on Nang-yi as the main character – and eventually find its way back to the narrator and his grandfather – you’d be wrong.

Nang-yi is in the film, and she plays an important role, but the film is really about her mother, Mohwa, the titular shaman sorceress. (And we never return to the narrator’s family, or to the painting that seemingly inspired the narrator to tell this story, which begs the question why the film spends so much time with them at the beginning. But I digress.)

Mohwa is a powerful and respected practitioner of an indigenous folk religion, and in a deep subversion of expectations, she’s also a single mother (of two children, from two different fathers) and an alcoholic.

She’s routinely called to perform exorcisms and various religious rituals, and seeing her drunkenly stumble around the village in the middle of the day is a surprisingly common sight. And while the villagers call her out on her disrespectful behavior, they still rely on her powers as a shaman.

Mohwa is someone who should have no power, historically speaking, and though she literally and figuratively lives on the fringe of Korea’s patriarchal society, she doesn’t hide in the shadows. She knows her power and is unafraid to flaunt it. She has somehow managed to defy the cultural expectations that surround her.

In short, Mohwa is a wholly unexpected character.

Conflict comes knocking when Mohwa’s son, Wook-yi, returns home. When he was a boy, he was sent to live at a Buddhist monastery, but when he turned 15, he struck out on his own… and found Jesus.

An impassioned convert to Christianity, Wook-yi returns to his mother and sister full of righteous indignation and judgment. He’s full of the gospel and wants everyone to love Jesus and the Bible as much as he does.

It’s around this point the movie takes a hard right turn and treads awfully close to being Christian dogma. Wook-yi isn’t just given dialogue to make him seem like a devoted Christian; he feels like a conduit for the filmmakers to spread their own beliefs. (However, from what I can determine, this isn’t the case.)

But it’s not just dialogue. Oh, did I forget to mention? The Shaman Sorceress is a musical (that steers just shy of being an opera). Every few minutes, Korean pop singers Sonya (Mohwa) and Kim Da-hyun (Wook-yi) belt out a series of Broadway-worthy tunes.

And Wook-yi’s songs could be hymns; they are deeply rooted in the language of the faithful, full of flowery terms for Jesus, god’s kingdom, and the eternal rewards that await true believers.

However, the film isn’t about converting the audience to Christianity (thankfully). Indeed, Mohwa isn’t fooled by her son’s conversion or enticed by his promises. In fact, she’s convinced he’s become possessed by an evil spirit and begins exorcism rituals.

And just as Wook-yi never doubts the power of his god, Mohwa never sways from her own beliefs or the trust she’s placed in her power as a shaman. They’re two immovable rocks.

Director Ahn employs this conflict between faiths – which eventually tears the characters apart and destroys them both – as a metaphor for the conflict with Western cultures that eventually eroded Korean traditions.

The film never makes a clear statement about which side is “right,” even though it’s clear that neither is. In battles such as these, there is no “right” side; there are just powerful sides and even more powerful sides. And Mohwa and Wook-yi eventually both fall victim to their implacable beliefs.

The Shaman Sorceress is a sumptuously animated film that’s beyond joyful to watch. Relatively simple character designs are set against lush and vibrant backgrounds clearly meant to evoke nostalgia for an era of Korean history that can never be reclaimed.

Expectations be damned, you will walk away asking many questions, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.