The debut feature of Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovsky, which opens today at Cinema Village, is the sort of unclassifiable enigma that sends one scrambling for a crib sheet. Is “4” a dream? A record of lost souls? A Rabelaisian allegory for contemporary Russia? Or is it simply an assured stylistic exercise, written by a provocateur (novelist Vladimir Sorokin)? The film doesn’t say exactly, but this dramatic pastiche’s singular vision and unfailing ability to surprise make explanations seem irrelevant.

Begin at the beginning: an opening shot of dogs lounging on a city street at night. Tongue-lolling small-hour calm holds for a few moments until – smash! – four huge claw-diggers begin clanging into the pavement with a clamor to wake the dead (and the dogs). As an overture, it’s akin to Dali’s razor from “Un chien andalou,” a recognizably Surrealist violence. It’s not cruel but gloriously irrational, setting a tone of instability and unleashing a thrillingly chaotic, profane creativity.

Introductions to three desultory characters follow in a series of vivid shots, plucked from around the city, without telling us much. Marina (Marina Vovchenko), a prostitute, leaves an orgy,Volodya (Sergei Shnurov) appears to be a low-grade meat wholesaler hawking ancient beef to a dealer, and the moody piano tuner Oleg (Yuri Laguta) visits a client.When they meet by chance at an empty bar at night (in what sounds like the introduction to a joke), our expectations are raised by this promising ground zero for romance, adventure, and mystery.

Instead, the three indulge in the pleasures of fibbing, spinning mordant fantasies to fill the night and entertain each other. It’s a combination of rambling and focused conceit that is the only predictable thing about “4” (for the first half, at least). Marina claims to represent a company that makes miracle air-purifiers, embellishing with deadpan skill. Oleg handdelivers bottled water to the Kremlin.

While we think we know they’re telling tales, the practiced feel of their bull session makes it hard to tell. And so when Volodya talks of a Soviet cloning program that dates back decades, it’s one more nudge to shake us off-kilter. Where is all this going?

Mr. Khrzhanovsky’s masterstroke is to open out from the stasis of the bar scene into the bumpier terrain of Marina’s life. First some almost conceptualist scenes intervene involving Oleg and Volodya (e.g., a visit to a restaurant serving specially bred piglets). But then their narratives fall away, and we join Marina as she wakes up in a room overlooking an industrial landscape. Bleary blues and grays predominate, as elsewhere in the movie.

Marina makes a solitary trek through Tarkovskian fields to her home village,where a relative’s funeral is taking place. From here on out, the film plunges into scenes of frenzied emotion and action. All glow with a very special kind of star power: the village’s inhabitants, a roiling group of toothless babushkas who bawl, cackle, tumble, strip, tussle, and ultimately drink themselves into a stupor.

These seniors are the most formidable force to hit screens in a while. Their party scene at the wake is filmed almost entirely in lurching close-ups of happy toothless faces shucking pork off the bone and bellowing folk songs. Marina and her sisters who still live there can’t keep up.

It all strikes just as we might begin to pity the desperation and weirdness of their circumstances in this village flowing with mud and mist. The grannies even chew bread to be molded into faces for handmade, anatomically correct rag dolls.

You begin to see what I mean by explanations feeling irrelevant. Mr. Khrzhanovsky’s work no doubt could use some discipline (and preferably originating from somewhere other than the structured succession of set pieces that, in retrospect, reveal Mr. Sorokin’s hand), and he will make better movies than this. But the demonstrated energy of a controlled freak-out like this is a nice first work for him to have under his belt, and a new unknown pleasure for us to enjoy.