SO LONG, MARIANNE: Maria Pankratz.

Slow though his films may be, Carlos Reygadas does not leave an audience wondering about intent. His opening shots are bold announcements—invitations to join him, cautions against proceeding further, permissions to leave while the squeaks of settling theater chairs will mask your retreat. Japón, his Tarkovsky-worshipping debut, commences with a direct lift from Solaris and proceeds to circle above the master. The promise of this first feature was squandered in Battle in Heaven, a muddle that declares its hollow prurience right away, with a languid blowjob that ends on a solitary tear streaking down a woman’s cheek. If that’s not fair warning, I don’t know what is.

Reygadas’ remarkable new film, Silent Light, begins with a lengthy shot of a starry night sky that fades up, in smooth time-lapse photography, to a morning horizon. That sky, its sublime beauty, the dreadful distance between us and it, the belief that there is something beyond—those are the risky subjects of Silent Light. They are the same metaphysical problems that haunt his past work, but for the first time, Reygadas seems to understand the fears and desires of the people who live beneath that maddening vastness.

The hypnotized performances and rigorous compositions hide a story that’s pure melodrama: In a small German Mennonite community in Northern Mexico, stoic family man Johan (Cornelio Wall) is being torn between his wife Esther (played with exceptional grace by Miriam Toews) and his mistress Marianne (Maria Pankratz). Johan is betraying his family, and he is incapable of acting. He moves and speaks deliberately, as if waiting for a great wind to erode his doubt, or for lightning to kill him quickly.

But his crisis of faith—in himself, not God—has quickened the world around him. Marianne and Johan have trespassed against God, but they have stumbled upon glory, too. As Marianne says, “This is the saddest time of my life. But also the best.” It is a time and a world of rapturous despair, and Reygadas captures, in nearly every miraculous shot, that bizarre and queasy sensation of blissful terror. The film’s final scene of rebirth, which echoes Dreyer’s masterpiece Ordet, could be construed as homage or outright theft, but I consider it, along with the rest of Silent Light, an act of faith—in images, not God—that is increasingly rare.