“Does God love everyone?” This is one of several questions broached in “Beyond the Gates,” a gut-wrenching drama of the Rwandan genocide directed by Michael Caton-Jones. A Tutsi girl (Clare-Hope Ashitey) puts it to a priest as a nearby mob of machete-wielding Hutus prepares to spill innocent blood. She wants to know if God loves them, too.

The same girl later asks her white teacher why he left when the United Nations pulled out of Rwanda. His face tightens. “I was afraid to die.”

It’s not often you come across such candor in the movies, even the recent spate of serious, politically engaged movies about Africa. The continent’s woes have been coming to the screen as drama (“Hotel Rwanda”), thriller (“The Constant Gardener”), hopped-up allegory (“The Last King of Scotland”), and, most recently, sweeping adventure tale (“Blood Diamond”), but these exceptional films all tell the story of individuals trying to rescue a continent betrayed by the West.

Is Africa emerging from years of cinematic neglect, or just enjoying a brief vogue at the box office? It’s beginning to look like the latter: Audiences, judging by their lukewarm interest in “Blood Diamond,” are getting bored. Some critics complain that the main characters in these films about Africa are too often white, while others fret that big-budget entertainment is a disingenuous way to get a message across. “Beyond the Gates,” an impassioned rebuke to Western apathy that focuses on two British men in Rwanda, is almost surely in the wrong place at the wrong time.

That’s too bad, because this well-acted drama is on par with its predecessors set in Uganda, Kenya, and Sierra Leone. And while Terry George’s “Hotel Rwanda” told an almost identical story two years ago, Mr. Caton Jones (who shot on location in the Rwandan capital of Kigali) infuses “Beyond the Gates” with an intensity that was absent from the demure long shots and wanly elegiac mood of Mr. George’s film.

Joe Connor (Hugh Dancy) is an idealistic young teacher in Rwanda who never imagined he’d witness one of history’s most horrific massacres. The school’s headmaster (John Hurt), on the other hand, a kind, dyspeptic priest named Father Christopher, isn’t the type to be caught off guard. He’s spent “30 years on this bloody continent,” and when word arrives that the Rwandan president, a Hutu, has been killed, he knows it’s serious.

He also knows what to do. As Tutsis seeking protection from Hutu reprisals gather outside the school — which is serving as the base for a small force of U.N. peacekeepers — Father Christopher overrules the Belgian commander (Dominique Horwitz) and lets them in. A barricade is erected to keep the Hutu militias at bay. Father Christopher assumes that faith and forbearance will ultimately prevail, and he intends to wait out the crisis. A trip into town, however, brings a rude awakening: The streets are full of hacked-up bodies and Hutus whom he thought he knew well are out for Tutsi blood. Even the convent has become a mausoleum of stinking corpses. “I’ve not seen this before,” he croaks upon his return to the school, still reeling from shock.

While Father Christopher doesn’t go so far as to doubt God’s existence, he would sure like to know what He is thinking. Mr. Dancy, a decent actor who usually plays dreamboats of the frock-coated sort, has more screen time than the 67-year-old Mr. Hurt, who has a face like a scrap of old leather. But Father Christopher’s loss of innocence is more interesting, mainly because we didn’t know he had it to begin with.

The priest — who is based on a Bosnian missionary whom screenwriter David Belton, a BBC reporter, met while covering the genocide in 1994 — is at first confident that “civilization” will eventually save the day. But the film unnervingly depicts its protective layers peeling away without resistance: The rule of law disintegrates, a convent is desecrated, and, most outrageous of all, a cadre of well-armed U.N. soldiers is ordered not to keep the peace but to “monitor” it. This they do, until no peace remains — at which point they pack up and leave. This craven act is as cruel as the fate to which it condemns the thousands of helpless Tutsis left behind, who beg the soldiers, in the film’s most emotionally wrenching scene, to shoot them so they won’t have to meet their end by machete.

The politicians who orchestrated the U.N. pullout remain outside the frame. Like the divinity Father Christopher serves, they manifest themselves indirectly, and communicate through mouthpieces. The film’s devastating coda shows news footage of a State Department spokeswoman stumbling through excuses about the “phraseology” of genocide — a word that, if agreed upon by the U.N., would have impelled the Security Council to intervene in Rwanda — and, for that matter, Darfur. Like Mr. Hurt’s priest, she doesn’t seem all that sure of herself. “Beyond the Gates,” even if it isn’t breaking news, is a powerful reminder of why she shouldn’t.