Benh Zeitlin’s debut is part film, part hallucination: a ripe, gamey Apocalyptic Southern Gothic, flawed but bursting with energy. Set during hurricane Katrina, it also feels like a far-future climate disaster or a modern retelling of the biblical flood.

The story unfolds in an eerily beautiful bayou, below the levee and off the grid. It is a place of constant flood risk and distant government.

When Katrina hits, the rising water intensifies the existing chaos. Wink, a hard-drinking father with a collapsing shack and a grave illness, lives there with his six-year-old daughter Hushpuppy. Poverty has made racial distinctions beside the point, and Hushpuppy’s anger over her absent mother erupts in a frightening blow to Wink’s heart.

The crisis draws Wink and Hushpuppy closer as he ferries her and others toward safety in a journey that recalls Apocalypse Now. Survival seems possible only if they can force the floodwaters down by attacking the levee keeping others dry.

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a vivid response to Katrina and its humiliating exposure of American poverty. Yet the film rejects pity, driven instead by Wink’s defiant libertarianism as he mocks fear, rallies his neighbours, and urges Hushpuppy to flex her tiny “guns”. Wink and Hushpuppy resist official help as safety and order only drain them. In a clinic, Hushpuppy says it feels like an empty fish tank.

Beasts of the Southern Wild closely echoes Terrence Malick in its inspiration and flaw. The rough, mean landscapes recall his work, while Wallis’s vulnerability and Zeitlin’s ambition are exhilarating, burning with ambition and poetry.