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Young Mexican writer-director Carlos Reygadas remains, even after three films, a rather large puzzle—and a hotly controversial one at that. He says he left his lawyer-diplomat career after viewing films by Andrei Tarkovsky, the great Russian mystic filmmaker (Andrei Rublev), and he also claims the hefty influence of France's arch-Catholic Robert Bresson (The Diary of a Country Priest, The Pickpocket), the fellow who, more than anyone else, put on the cinematic map "transcendental style in film," as Paul Schrader titled it for his classic book. That bodes well for both seriousness and style, unless taken too far, and for that, an over-the-top artsiness, Reygadas has gotten huge flack. In one sequence he may well deliver long splendorous takes of a numinous nature, enough to make the jaded gasp and kneel right there in the theater. And in the next, well, porn—meaning fully graphic sexual display, stark and transgressive, especially in its lack of eroticism.

If that were not discombobulating enough, his most recent film, Silent Light, co-winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2007, tells with elegant respect the story of a Mexican Mennonite couple plagued by the husband's long-running love affair with another Mennonite woman (acted by non-professionals, Mennonites playing Mennonites). Predictable Reygadas is not, even for his hip art house acolytes, of whom there are plenty.

Whatever Reygadas' excesses in his first two films, Japón (2002) and Battle in Heaven (2005), Silent Light delivers a restrained story, sequential and understandable from start to finish, though the ending delivers a first-class jolt of amazement and character motivation, at least in part, stays puzzling throughout.

Here, in the most conventional of Reygadas' films, we mostly watch these unconventional people quietly living, seemingly contentedly, their very ordinary farm life. There is, as always, a rub, the broken part, and in this case it is Johan (Cornelio Wall), husband and father of six, who finds himself and his loving wife Esther (Canadian novelist Miriam Toews), whom he loves in return, entangled with another Mennonite woman, Marianne (Maria Pankratz), who runs a coffee shop in town. While the affair is problematic enough, something with which Johan struggles, even at one point consulting his father (played by the actor's own father, Peter Wall), he aggravates matters still further by keeping his wife informed of the state of both his inclinations and assignations. And this goes on season after season. We cannot decide whether Johan is witless or cruel, for his stoic Esther quietly endures, though harboring vast quantities of wrenching pain. Here Reygadas takes a lesson from the late Ingmar Bergman, who could charge the most mundane setting—a small room with a ticking clock, say—with explosive emotional force.

This strange tale is complicated, first, by the use of non-professional actors, a standard practice for Reygadas, and second, by a directorial nod toward Bresson, who told his non-pros not to act but to perform their roles and lines unaffectedly. Bresson posited that emotional intensity diverted viewers' attention from the larger trajectories of plot that reveal the architecture of the means by which grace emerges. Character portrayal thus has an opaqueness about it, a lack of expressivity in the absence of non-verbal clues that signal subjective mood and idea. The opening sequence of Silent Light ends with Johan sitting alone at the kitchen table wracked with tears. Upset he is, clearly, but whether that emerges from grief, confusion, guilt, or whatever is unclear, especially in what follows, and so it pretty much remains from start to finish. This can prove maddening, as it does in Battle in Heaven, but also, when done well, amply enticing, prodding viewers to ponder the mysteries of the soul and its embodiedness, and especially the depths that lie beyond expression, in words or otherwise. So it is, then, difficult to discern what Johan thinks he's up to in this protracted confessional triangle, both women at different points even commiserating with Johan on the pain each of them (but, strangely, not Johan) must cause the other. And we thought only Woody Allen's New Yorkers behaved this way.

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