German director Valeska Grisebach comes to Cannes in Competition this year, nearly a decade after her Un Certain Regard entry Western, and the step up is well earned; The Dreamed Adventure — a title that doesn’t at all reflect the content — is a remarkable piece of work, a realist drama that homes in on a drab lawless town on the Bulgaria-Turkey border and somehow instils it with all the paranoid danger of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. Chief to its success is a powerhouse performance by Yana Radeva, who summons the spirit of Gena Rowlands in Gloria as a woman determined not to be defined by men.

It takes a while for Grisebach’s film to reveal itself, since it starts with Said (Syuleyman Letifov), some sort of building contractor, rolling into the town of Svilengrad, situated at a tripoint close to Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece. Said is looking for The Raven (an elusive man he will very soon find), but so are a lot of other people, in an area that has clearly seen better days. There used to be a casino, but that’s now long gone. In place of everything that used to be there is a long stretch of road filled nose-to-tail with articulated lorries. “When they built the motorway,” a local sighs, “everything disappeared.”

Said’s car also disappears, spirited away by local thieves, but Said doesn’t seem too bothered about it because, as we later find out, he is on the shady side himself, looking to make a deal to buy dodgy fuel from The Raven. Instead, he meets another old friend, Veska (Yana Radeva), who is part of an archaeological dig nearby. This seems like a random connection at first, but, as the film goes on to reveal, Veska has connections that run deep, not only with Said but the local area.

The immediate assumption is that archaeology here is being used in the abstract sense, as it was in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, to suggest a sense of modern life’s exploitation of history. But the more we find out about Veska, and when Said disappears, the more we realize that Svilengrad’s secrets are much closer to the surface than the trinkets of the ancient Greeks. Indeed, when Veska drinks with some women she knows from the area, they reflect on dangerous times they knew as youngster. “We lived in such fear back then,” says one. It sounds like she’s talking about the Second World War, but she means the 1990s.

Said’s strange disappearance inspires Veska to take his place in the fuel deal, a seemingly reckless decision that Grisebach goes on to explain in almost forensic detail. Veska goes back such a long way in the town that he once had a dalliance with the Iliya, the fearsome local gang boss who deals drugs and people (both, it is suggested, through the trucks that line the motorway). Iliya is terrifying but human, and somehow Veska is less afraid of him than he is of her. Veska reserves her fear for Iliya’s henchmen, knowing that these mindless, gold-chained thugs won’t listen to her in the way that he will.

The story plays out at a leisurely pace that Grisebach breaks up with scenes that just have to have been improvised with non-professionals; when you see a guy dancing at one of Iliya’s parties with a tattoo of an AK-47 on his neck, it’s hard to believe that a film like this has such an extensive budget for hair and makeup. Chilling moments like this are the lifeblood of The Dreamed Adventure, the moments that recall the pitiful last days of the dying Communist era and then then violent, mafia-style economics that whooshed in to replace them.

How Grisebach transforms such an ostensibly drab beginning into a gripping story of mob control, sexual violence, and national identity in crisis is a testament to her skill as a director. “Bulgarians are willing to do anything to make money,” says one character, and, whether that’s true or not, Grisebach’s film takes a deep dive into the culture of bullying — some state-sanctioned, most of it not — that might have got them there. There aren’t enough words; it’s tremendous.

Title: The Dreamed Adventure
Festival: Cannes (Competition)
Director/Screenwriter: Valeska Grisebach
Cast: Syuleyman Letifov, Yana Radeva, Velko Frandev
Sales: The Match Factory
Running time: 2 hrs 35 mins