“Noir-noir” someone remarked, and one might wonder how in a first feature at a mere twenty-six, Géla Babluani can have written and directed the award-winning updated throwback that is 13/Tzameti. Russian Georgia-born and cinematically educated in Paris, Babluani  knows his ‘50s French cinema and, “childhood memories . . . like rays of light which cut through the darkness [and] come back to me,” the great past Soviet films and those of his regarded filmmaker father, Temur.

Cinematographer Tariel Meliava’s camera in black-and-white high-contrast graininess, the unrelievedly seedy mise-en-scène and stubbly participants -- virtually no female presence -- and plot complications-twists, have already called forth comparisons with early Hitchcock, Bresson, Wenders and Polanski. Short jumpy scenes, less graphic flash than Reservoir Dogs and -- inevitable comparison -- a meaningful less meaning than the penultimate The Deer Hunter sequence, add to making this an icy cool début that may not grab everyone but will delight cinephiles.

While not exactly repellent, none of the numerous characters is what can be called attractive. Sympathy has to hover around the twenty-two-year-old protagonist Sébastien (Géla’s brother Georges), ambiguously innocent and sacrificing, yet also morally indecisive, taciturn and, up to and arguably right through the end, none too bright. There are purposely unresolved Raymond Chadler-esque issues and gaps, a deliberate look-alike refusal to differentiate the players -- including flics from crooks -- and a deadpan dénouement that is reckoned on, enriches a struggling immigrant family and casually betrays only one of the numerous underworldlings, shabbily dapper Schloendorf (Vania Vilers).

In this milieu where life and death are literally a morphine-supported crapshoot, speech is close and clipped, personalities subservient to situation, personal names of such unimportance that most do not actually have noticeable ones while others are identifiable by function or by numbers on sweaty tee shirts or by physical tags, e.g., a broken nose, Schloendorf’s cane-aided limp, Number 3’s gross diarrhetic bulk and 1’s bespectacled tininess.

The spectator and Sébastien stumble into this menagerie with “no idea what it’s about.” In helping out his family through makeshift labor as roofer at a down-at-heels house on the French coast, the simple young man is drawn into the affairs and overdose death of Jean-François Godon (Philippe Passon). Surveilling the latter, the police ineptly try to shadow the roofer when he eavesdrops and then takes up the promise of money in an anticipated letter ill-winded his way. Its succinct spy-movie instructions lead to an abandoned château in the woods.

The place is crowded tonight. Gamblers have assembled for the present edition of a peripatetic event, though appreciably smaller than a previous one in Istanbul. The game, Sébastien and we learn, is a circular Russian roulette, where betting is on players whose revolvers point, not at their own heads but at those immediately in front. Round One specifies one round in each cylinder; Round Two, two bullets, and so on, until a lottery determines which two of the survivors are to face off in a Duel. In the highly organized event, wagers under one-hundred thousand dollars are “not worth it,” the edgy shooters are psychopathic, psychotic or drugged, and, forced into replacing Godon as Number 13 in the eight-hundred-fifty- thousand-dollar prize competition, the hero is handled, backed and bullied by tough guy Alain (Fred Ulysse) and his henchmen.

Along with the cash, suspense piles up. The buildup well handled, no splattered gore and losers’ bodies unobtrusively removed, the audience expectantly hushes in the film and the movie theater, eyeing the naked lightbulb signal while the master of ceremonies (Pascal Bongard) barks instructions and chambers are spun with unnatural loudness. Life here is transformed in this supreme risk and thrill, the ultimate extreme sport, where reward is money and nothing more.

Having lost the scent, upholders of law but not appealing, the police nevertheless have at least their advantage of ubiquity. Sooner or later to re-enter the picture, they arrive too late for some, too early for others. 13 (honored at Venice in 2005 and at Sundance in 2006) has no facile moralizing -- or preachiness of any sort, for that matter -- and that objectivity, with the reinforcement of controlled coldness of daring technique, makes for absorbing film. Overused frisson, after all, derives from frigēre, “to be cold.”

(Released by Palm Pictures; not rated by MPAA.)