The inexhaustible durability of genre movies — our rich cinematic heritage of recognizable story styles and their defining and malleable conventions — has, in happier creative times, been roughly analogous to the cyclical rebuilding of thriving new cities on the sites of the metropolises that came before. But lately, the majority of American forays into genre hardly seem worth the trip. Dumbed-down popcorn fodder seems increasingly inspired by the box-office receipts of a previous film, rather than by a tradition of narrative or stylistic ingenuity. Latter-day action movies, policiers, romantic comedies, and others are generally assembled with such cynical lack of craft that they achieve little more than a crude spark of Pavlovian recognition in their intended audience.

“Anamorph,” a new film opening today at IFC Center on the same day it becomes available on cable, via IFC’s on-demand service, is that increasingly rare commodity — a contemporary genre film that doesn’t stumble as it looks backward to capture the spirit of the films that inspired it. Directed with cool, unostentatious economy by Henry Miller, and written (by Mr. Miller and Tom Phelen) with a singularly keen ear for the ebb and flow of neurotic and pathological human behavior, “Anamorph” features a gloomy but highly engaging incandescence that is all the more surprising considering the genre column it occupies. Plainly put, “Anamorph” is a serial-murder-thriller, a fusion of police procedural and horror film that has, like many recent concept splicings, declined in maturity and intelligence since an early 1990s heyday.

All the potentially dreary and familiar trappings of lowbrow films about high-concept killings are present in “Anamorph.” There’s a socially and professionally marginalized cop named Stan Aubray (Willem Dafoe) who’s still in the grip of the fallout surrounding an unsolved case and a victim he couldn’t save five years back. Aubray, in turn, has a new (or at least newly active) anonymous killer to reckon with who excels at creating gruesome tableaux to pique the cop’s interest and pick at his vulnerability. The cop is equipped with an ambitious young partner (Scott Speedman), an ex-hooker non-girlfriend and potential new victim (Clea Duvall), an antiques-buying habit, and a desk job teaching new recruits how to penetrate the minds and the motivations of people who kill a lot and like it. There’s even a visit to the homicidal mastermind’s vacant hideout in an abandoned amusement park. But the amusement park in question is the old Coney Island Playland. And like much of the rest of the places and people in “Anamorph,” it looks and feels real. What also feels real is Aubray’s grief and guilt over how he bungled the “Uncle Eddie” killings, as the murders that made his reputation and sealed his fate are known. “We may never know why he did what he did,” Aubray informs his class. “He may never know.” But as the cop and his quarry circle each other in an ever-tightening spiral, the riddle of why people do the things they do at least gets answered in Aubray’s case. I cannot honestly claim to have understood the surprisingly trippy ending of “Anamorph” on a plot level, but emotionally it packed a wallop.

There are three very strong forces at work that enable “Anamorph” to vault its lean, 108-minute dramatic frame over the high bar and claim serial murderer film gold. First, Mr. Miller rarely falls prey to the potential pretentiousness of the film’s conceit, which involves murders inspired by Renaissance artistic innovations (the film’s title refers to an antiquated technique in which a painting shows two different images depending on which angle it is viewed from).

Second, Messrs. Miller and Phelen’s script is blessed with marvelously understated dialogue. And finally, Messrs. Dafoe and Speedman, Ms. Duvall, and the rest of the cast comfortably inhabit their uncomfortable characters with uniform ease.

When the script teeters on the brink of silliness (as in a scene involving a gigantic pantograph that was reminiscent of the cliffhangers in the old Adam West “Batman” TV series), the cast’s diligent application of craft saves the moment. When an individual performance jumps the tracks (Peter Stormare’s turn as an art dealer appears to be an unconscious homage to Stanley Kubrick’s exaggerated acting muse of the late ’50s, Timothy Carey), well-chosen words and camera angles put it all in perspective.

“Anamorph” may not be a truly great movie, but it’s a really good one. Within the depressing sprawl of poorly constructed and cynically executed post-“Silence of the Lambs” manhunt movies, it stands out like a lovingly rebuilt brownstone in a row of gaudy pre-fab condos.