In 2023, Belvoir scored a critical and audience hit with its adaptation of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Three years later, director-adaptor Eamon Flack takes a similar ‘rough magic’ approach to Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. It doesn’t reach the same dazzling, dizzying heights, however.

Published in Poland in 2009 (and translated into English in 2018), Tokarczuk’s novel is set in a village near the Czech border, where a series of grisly killings of prominent men – all avid hunters – has the community on edge. With the local police short on imagination, an eccentric loner and keen astrologer, Janina Duszejko (Pamela Rabe), sets out to solve the mystery herself.

It begins with the death of Janina’s neighbour, whom she calls ‘Bigfoot’, found with a deer bone lodged in his throat. Other bodies follow: one bludgeoned and ringed by hoof prints, another discovered decomposing and riddled with beetle larvae.

Guided by her star charts, her loathing of hunting (she believes her beloved dogs were shot for sport) and her deep antipathy toward the patriarchy, Janina becomes convinced the killings are the work of a vengeful animal kingdom. All she has to do is prove...