Fungus is having a moment in horror cinema right now, particularly in the festival faves of the past year. From In the Earth to Gaia to arguably The Feast to HBO’s upcoming adaptation of The Last of Us, filmmakers and audiences seem to be a bit weary of mother earth. In a way, it makes perfect sense because, while some are delicious, narratives like Tin Can showcase just how creepy and unsettling fungus can be.

Tin Can throws the viewer into the middle of a pandemic caused by some fungal spore named Coral that’s destroying the world. One in twenty-five are living with the disease and only a fraction are receiving medical care, with a shortage of medical workers causing global problems. Yep, get ready for a ton of pandemic films tapping into our fears and frustrations from the last year and beyond. Quickly, the film introduces Fret (The Expanse’s Anna Hopkins), a parasitologist who’s trying to find a cure for the infection. Just as quickly, she is violently knocked unconscious and awakens in the titular tin can, her feet sitting in a vat of liquid and hoses going in and out of her mouth and body. “Welcome back,” a robotic voice says.

But back to what?

As she begins to slowly and painfully pull out the tubes, a male voice groans. It belongs to John (Simon Mutabazi), Fret’s onetime lover. Through flashbacks and conversations with people waking up in their own tin cans, Seth Smith’s narrative shows that, before he ended up in a tin can, John had the fungal infection, with Fret taking pustules off of his body. In the present, words like being “pumped full of the antifreeze” and “self-committing” as well as golden robotic individuals coming and taking tin cans away create an uneasy and distanced experience.

Tin Can is the kind of movie that almost requires multiple viewings. The narrative is fractured as writer/director Seth Smith interweaves these flashbacks to give insight into Fret, John and their team through the more claustrophobic and septic-colored present. It creates a jarring structure where the viewer only gets bits and pieces of the plot and characters and are forced to come to their own conclusions.

Pieces of dialogue, like John’s opening monologue where he says goodbye to Fret seem somewhat inconsequential while watching. It was only by going back through my notes where I realized how many little breadcrumbs Smith laid out from the very beginning. Those looking for a consistent throughline that spells out everything will probably be disappointed or confused because, while Tin Can throws a lot of goo and straight forward plot points, the character work (and subsequent theme) is subtle to the point of inscrutable at times.

The second act, in particular, is a slow burn of disembodied voices discussing their situation in a very natural way that assumes everyone knows what’s going on; the audience, of course, is consistently kept out of the loop. Smith has created a fully visualized world that simultaneously keeps the audience at arms length, forcing the viewer to keep up and learn the truth on-the-fly. As such, some of the reveals don’t feel as impactful as they probably were intended simply because the viewer is still trying to understand the world, let alone the twists and turns. Likewise, the ending makes sense in the plot department but it is equally subtle in unraveling its message.

Without spoiling the character-driven twists and turns, Tin Can shows that scientists and those who hope for the best for humanity can also be driven by too-human needs, desires and pettiness. And that life isn’t meant to last. Tin Can is decidedly not for everyone and asks to be met on its own terms, rather than the audience’s. For all of its sci-fi conventions, creepy automatons, goopy growths and horrific sounds, the narrative is grounded in humanity and Fret’s life. I cannot get the bleak implications of the story out of my mind; while the film absolutely won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, it has lingered, like the Coral itself, in my mind since I watched it.

The nihilistic theme and the subtle character work benefits multiple viewings, but not everyone will sign-up for a second helping of this slow-burn gooey mess of a movie.