Just thirty-seven even after years on the national rugby team and in diplomatic legal services for the European Union and Mexico, Carlos Reygadas has directed a limited few shorts and features, which he also wrote, produced and edited. The auteur is the honoree of the Museum of Modern Art’s “Filmmaker in Focus” for all three full-lengths, which he views as connected, and rare Buñuel-Daliesque shorts like Max (1999). Showing concurrently are Ordet (1954-55) and Gertrud (1964) by Carl Theodor Dreyer, an influence on the Mexican in thematic material -- institutional vs. individual religiosity and sexuality; ambiguous often pre- or off-screen moral motivation --and in techniques such as prolonged silences, painterly compositions recalling the Dutch masters, and the use of non-actors.

Battle in Heaven/Batalla en el cielo (2005) has been reviewed here, and début Japón (2002; the title mystifyingly means “Japan”) becomes a trial. The latter is a confusion of potential about a lame man (Alejandro Ferretis) bent on suicide who goes to an isolated canyon hamlet, there to establish a strange relationship with elderly Ascen (Magdalena Flores), in whose to-be-dismantled barn he rents the bed of her deceased husband. The film abounds with the director’s characteristic silences, unclarified desires and murky religious and secular symbols, unlovely bodies and unenjoyed intercourse, ambient barnyard or vehicular hum, lens flare, self-conscious symmetry, and repeated pans and tracking shots, the final one of which conveniently slides down a railroad track to reveal a dénouement perfectly obvious without this excess footage.

The works relatively more accessible as the career continues, Battle in Heaven is tighter and recommendable even if hardly fodder for the multiplex moviegoer.

More understandable if still not public cup of tea, is the third, last year’s Stellet Licht (Silent Light), its title and, with a smidgen of Spanish, dialogue in the Germanic dialect of the Chihuahua Mennonite community, Dutch-Swiss Anabaptist pacifist cousins of America’s more conservative Amish. The time scheme takes place within the farming community’s cycle of nature, although, an eyeblink in the sight of the Lord, first and last minutes are, respectively, stars dimming downwards into rosy dawn and golden dusk darkening up into heaven’s constellations.

Extended takes of developing scene within unmoving camera are even more religiously symmetrical than in the two earlier features; and just prior to that wrapping-up sunset is a stunning white-on-white Pre-Raphaelite laying-out scene which, following a tantalizing tear from either above or below, unhappily is diminished by a miracle as matter-of-fact.

Devoted to their brood of towheads, Johannes “Johan” and Esther Voth (Cornelio Wall, Miriam Toews) have misplaced the sparkle of early married life. The director’s characters talk little and never vocalize inner feelings or reveal the past as cause, but it is open between husband and wife that for two years he has been carrying on with waitress Marianne (Maria Pankratz). Car mechanic Zacharías (Jacobo Klassen) is the only neighbor to share the secret until Johan reveals all to his preacher-father (Peter Wall), calls his marriage “a mistake” but requests that mother Ruth (Elizabeth Fehr) not be told.

The laconic sire and son hesitantly speculate about God’s or Satan’s or man’s will -- as much clarification as is offered. A hurried bedding in a motel, when Marianne calls him a “good man” and says it is finished, is followed by a moment of concern for the kids left in the restaurant but uncovers no background for starting up or ending their relationship. Indeed, the adulterer’s sole moments of open passion come when he sings in happiness to Spanish radio at the auto shop and sobs at breakfast or a death.

This study in suppression does not imply an absence of humanity. Working with Reygadas’ loose or even absent screenplay, the Mennonite non-professionals from Mexico, Canada and Germany convey simple souls in domesticity, at work in fields or milking sheds, or in solidarity whether joy- or sorrowful. Life’s lows are borne with courage, alternated with understated highs of lunch breaks from hay baling, swimming with and bathing the children, or buying sweets. Outright laughs for the audience are few, like a first marijuana puff for Japón’s Ascen or mild Mennonite curses at a broken soft-ice-cream machine or medical jabber about obesity and alcoholism, as surface incident follows upon surface incident. On a bare wall the clock pendulum marks seconds and reflects a family meal, its later ticktock absence unnoticeable until it is conspicuously rewound.

Ferretis’ Japón outsider’s surprising request is to be explained, but never is; Johan “tried with all my might, but I failed” to take control, but that also is left off screen. The films’ sterling use and quality of light and lighting bathe the elemental stories in suggested metaphysics. The viewer must work hard for meaning, perhaps that of restricted redemption, and this demand on an audience will keep the unique director a festival favorite but a commercial non grata.

(Released by World Cinema Fund; not rated by MPAA.)