It’s Alien: The Farmhouse Cut when a mad biologist starts mucking around with the livestock - hormonally speaking - deep in the Irish countryside.

Already unhappy that he hasn’t been paid for allowing his cattle to be treated like guinea-pigs, John Lynch’s taciturn farmer Dan sniffs more trouble when vet Orla (Essie Davis) gets her hand bitten… while it’s two feet up a pregnant cow’s behind.

Mere hours after telling a pair of travellers (Creep’s creep Sean Harris and Ruth Negga) to move on, Dan is forced to seek their help when said cow goes into a particularly painful-looking labour.

“That calf’s not right,” observes Harris as it chomps down on Dan’s fingers. His gypsy intuition is backed up by Orla’s autopsy, which shows that the newborn was itself impregnated with mutant foetuses.

Next day, the slurry really hits the combine. Orla’s disappeared, the nutty professor is on his way back, and one of the slimy, carnivorous abortions is missing…

As a mad-cow allegory, Isolation ain’t subtle. But, made on a shoestring, it’s an effective exercise in rural horror.

Despite a premise tailor-made for black humour, writer-director Billy O’Brien takes matters dead seriously, using inventive camerawork and tight editing to create a squelchily uncomfortable atmosphere.

But seriousness begets dreariness and the film peters out with a disappointingly derivative climax (the subsequent coda is on the familiar side too).

It is, however, good to see the Irish Film Board backing a purely commercial venture. With a little foresight, O’Brien might even have boosted his budget further had he pitched his script to The Vegan Society.

Who’d have the taste for meat and dairy after this?

Elliott Noble