Jesús Moisés Rodríguez and Rubén Sosa in "Los Bastardos," Kino, 2009

A new "art film" proceeding pensively under the star of Bruno Dumont and Carlos Reygadas (a co-producer), Amat Escalante’s "Los Bastardos" (2008) has also been unjustly dished, for being too Reygadas-esque (but my God, wouldn’t you trade one Reygadas also-ran for ten Michael Bays?), and (for those without Reygadas’ chops) being less revealing about Mexican day laborers than being simply enigmatic and elusive. Which are, of course, the same thing. But from the very first super-long shot down the dry bed of the Los Angeles River to the last close-up in a massive strawberry field, Escalante’s film is a work of gripping concision, malevolent patience and queasy mystery.

The two protagonists, Jesus and Fausto (non-pros Jesús Moisés Rodríguez and Rubén Sosa), are just Mexican illegals looking for work across the street from a Home Depot; Escalante dawdles with the boys’ curbside cohort, before and while they finally get a gig digging a luxury house foundation by hand. Then we switch gears. Though both men seem to be upstanding and wary of trouble, something turns: they return to an abusive white-hick picnicker, shotgun in hand (Escalante cuts before we see what, if anything, happens). Then at night, the two men climb through a window and into a suburban house occupied by a miserable white mother (Nina Zavarin), who has replied to her teenage son’s gruff departure by knocking herself out with a hit of crack. No one talks much, but immediately the air is filled with suspended judgments -- the woman feeds the Mexicans microwave dinners, and then they all swim in the backyard pool (at gunpoint), then they share some more crack. She is convinced her ex-husband sent them; they don’t understand English and couldn’t much care. She seems to want to be raped, but they are equally disinclined, although cunnilingus does initiate a single rolling tear...

At no point does Escalante cue us as to what to expect -- a closed-room triangulated melodrama, or a Haneke-style confrontation with violence, or Tsai Ming-liang-ish ellipses, or something else. Certainly, you can pay no attention to Kino’s badass-Mexican-crime-drama packaging. The upshot is both meditative and terrifying, with Zavarin’s wasted middle-aged mom, hanging on so desperately to a middle-class existence and identity despite the hunger for toxic escape and her implicit run of rotten luck, standing out as an indelible creation. When the Holy Shit moment comes, you empathize more with the poor rag of a woman than you would ever have predicted.

“Last Year at Marienbad” (Criterion Collection) is now available on DVD and Blu-ray; “Los Bastardos” (Kino) is now available on DVD.

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