After bottles of critics’ ink admiring its continuous-take method, later word of mouth whispered of multiple walkouts at Russian Ark. There were repeats this week, as some simply could not make it through Father and Son, either. To be fair, many did praise the “rewarding” cinematography in both, but the suspicion is that, beneath a surface associated with long broody Russian novels and moody films, there is little of real substance in either of quarter-century veteran Alexander Sokurov’s two newest efforts.

In 1996, the director’s Mother and Son focused on decay and the pain of living, in recording a young man’s caring for his dying mother. Following that up, and the announced middle installment of an intended family-centered trilogy, the present consideration of a son and his sire is billed as “universal,” with neither specific time nor place -- filmed in Lisbon, it suggests a smallish port near Saint Petersburg -- and as showing the joy of life that coexists with anguish.

“Numbness,” instead of “joy,” however, is what permeates this masculine, military-ish world where, in dress and demeanor, the few women are deliberately old-fashioned. Opening overtones of  homoeroticism catch apparently naked widower Father (Andrey Schetinin) soothing, nearly making love to and grappling with, Son Alexei (Aleksey Neymyshev), the latter prone to bad dreams about his dead mother, drizzly fields and parricide.

The male leads are non-professional and attractive -- Schetinin, indeed, is stunning, way beyond the resemblance to Stallone in a rooftop workout -- and despite an early interchange between Alexei and his girl (Marina Zasukhina) that is brilliantly composed through window frames, their presence dominates. Feminine neighbors’ voices filter in and out from time to time but are merely like the radio’s low Tschaikovsky and background static; unfortunately, the masculine speakers mumble laconically, lip synch seems off, ghostly floating lines strike one as disembodied voice-overs, and only subtitles save the viewer, if just barely.

Son studies military training medicine as a cadet and lives in a spartan barracks-like flat with his ex-air army Father. Unclearly dangling over them are the photos, jewelry and memories of the absent woman in their lives, while, simultaneously wanting to and not, the younger male drives away the girlfriend he should have, and the father fecklessly rejects thoughts of remarriage.

They are roughly eighteen and forty, and there are unresolved hints concerning the latter’s physical health, possibly intended to parallel an emotional something. The girl speaks of having taken an unseen mature lover, perhaps “who could very well be the son’s own father”; and an amorphous young man shows up for information about his missing father, a professional companion of the Father’s and perhaps meant to reflect in some way on the twin protagonists.

But in consuming love-hate relationship, Father and Son form a hermetic world apart, a universe, unhappy as it is, in which only the two of them matter. Wrestling, cuddling lover-like, scrimmaging at soccer against a sloping roof or walking shaky plank bridges, they “read” one another and cannot separate. In imagery and in words, with reference to both sacred and profane, the crucifixion of son by father -- lower- and/or uppercase -- is tantalizingly brought up several times but at once dropped.

These faint clues and indirections as well as the physicalness  of tramcars and sports, the son’s recurrent dream along with both men’s real concern for one another, are intended to image a spirituality above and beyond the tangible. In mildly grainy angled light evocative of a Vermeer masked in white gauze, through an anamorphic lens to squeeze wide images into standard frames, Father and Son would echo Turgenev and point ahead to the Sokurov trilogy’s conclusion, tentatively titled Two Brothers and a Sister. But while Freudian Oedipal and Electra theory is murky, such tentative vagueness does not make for art or for communication. Words must be spoken and ideas expressed, as Sophocles, Strindberg, O’Neill and even Jules Dassin (Phaedra) knew, for the artist’s audience cannot be expected to supply everything.

(Released by Wellspring Media; not rated by MPAA.)