Few genres have the ability to surprise an audience like horror can. Action movies establish a premise and then play that premise out (“Bus can’t slow down…go!”). Comedies may throw us off balance with a joke or two, but we typically know what we’re going to get. And, sure, there are some subgenres of horror defined by their predictability – we watch slashers specifically because we know what we’re going to get. Others work as variations on a theme; vampire movies, for example, can be characterized by how they adhere to or stray from the traditional mythos. As a rule, though, horror doesn’t really have rules. It is not confined by narrative logic, nor by the rules of the physical world. Anything can happen. Often times, it does.

Small independent horror films like The Forest of Lost Souls, the feature directorial debut of Portuguese filmmaker José Pedro Lopes, have the capacity to surprise more than most. It has no big stars, no high-concept premise. In fact, the less known about the movie going in, the better. I knew only the title when I sat down to watch it for the purposes of this review, and I was not prepared for the directions in which the movie went. That makes summarizing the plot fairly tricky, though; I’ll just say that it opens with a young woman committing suicide in a fictional forest located between Portugal and Spain where many people go to kill themselves (not unlike Japan’s notorious Suicide Forest). Her father (Jorge Mota) later comes to the same forest to commit suicide, where he meets a girl named Carolina (Daniela Love), also there to end her life. They engage in a lot of discussion about suicide and about life in general.

I won’t say any more about where the movie goes from there, because spoiling the turns it takes would be to ruin what’s best about The Forest of Lost Souls. Suffice it to say that I spent the first half of its brief 71-minute running time wondering if was even a horror movie, and the second half having my uncertainty erased. Many of these opening scenes are very dialogue-driven, like if Richard Linklater’s Before series was set in a suicide forest. But they’re haunting at the same time, too, thanks to some really beautiful black and white photography (a thematic choice as well as a stylistic one; these are characters whose lives have become drained of color) and the score by Emanuel Grácio. There’s something sad and lyrical about the construction of the movie’s first half, which feels right for a story about loss and impending death.

There is a shift at some point, but I don’t want to say when or what kind of shift it is. Much of the rest of the film hinges on the performance of Daniela Love, who is very good at revealing necessary information about her character only the right time comes. If she didn’t work, neither would the movie. And while there will certainly be some viewers who are unwilling to go with the direction The Forest of Lost Souls takes in its second half, it’s really the story that Lopes has set out to tell. The early stuff is just misdirection. It’s exciting when a horror movie ends in a way you could never have predicted from its opening scenes, and the final scene of this one is pretty perfect.

The Forest of Lost Souls is small and fairly intimate for a horror film, but it’s an approach that makes sense given what it ultimately has to say about family and the connections between us as people. As the first theatrical feature being distributed by Wild Eye Releasing (a company known primarily for DTV horror and cult movies), it’s a good entry point: small but offbeat, efficient and effective. It’s the sort of movie that sticks with you not only for the turns it takes, but for the way its horror elements encroach on our day-to-day feelings of safety and security. I like a horror movie that can still surprise, especially when the surprises cut deep.