The advertised hook for “Vacancy,” a modest new thriller set in a back-road motel, is the customer-unfriendly snuff films being shot on the premises. But for all the implied gruesome potential of the setup, the occasional pleasures of this imaginatively shot film come more from nerve-jangling shocks than from the rending of flesh. The payoffs, though sporadic, are at least a well-made departure from the frights delivered by debrained remakes and torture procedurals.

The victims du jour are David (Luke Wilson) and Amy (Kate Beckinsale), a weary couple apparently in the process of a separation. Driving somewhere late at night, they take a detour, but you knew that already. In lieu of conversation, they engage in passive aggression, in the form of a wounded sulk from Ms. Beckinsale and, for Mr. Wilson, an enervated sarcasm that curdles his signature drawl. It isn’t long before you want to get out of the car as much as they do.

After receiving the attentions of a suspiciously friendly mechanic, car trouble strands the couple just a moonlit schlep away from the Pinewood Motel. They book a room with a man (Frank Whaley) whose pompadour and crossbar glasses should signal “batso” as clearly as they do “nerdy” in a comedy. Judging from the shrieks from a television in the room behind the front desk, he was also just watching a horror flick or thriller of some sort, but then so are we.

“Vacancy” installs the cranky couple in a drab but wide-angle spacious suite, and so begins the evening’s program of bumps, thumps, casually mislaid videotapes of previous occupants being terrorized, and the manager’s fleetfooted masked henchmen. Since David and Amy cotton to the fact that their camera-bugged room is effectively a snuff-film studio, the film shifts to cat-and-mouse suspense across the whole of the motel’s claustrophobic grounds.

That plays to the spatial strengths of director Nimród Antal, whose debut feature, “Kontroll,” made a scruffy-sleek hangout out of the Budapest subway. Just as that film’s underground scenes thrived on a fluorescent-lit gloom, the ins and outs of “Vacancy” benefit from a distinctive look of oblique lighting and close-ups (neither of which are especially flattering to a jowly Mr. Wilson). It’s also no surprise when a clandestine tunnel comes into play.

“Vacancy” aspires to be scarier and slightly more clever because David and Amy know the Memorex fate intended for them, encouraging both self-defense and self-recognition. Perhaps, but the film’s best bits are indeed the scenes of helpless voyeurism. The requisite moment of watching a possible savior walk into danger is especially haunting. When a cop arrives, David and Amy, stuck behind their room window, find their banging and shouting muffled. The camera zooms from the outside, bringing us closer but keeping us just as helplessly separate.

Cramped quarters cut both ways, however. The motel’s limited layout allows the couple only so much scheming for escape. And ordinary lulls between confrontations only make one wonder where on earth the attackers could be (watching the dailies, perhaps), and what they are doing instead of dutifully finding and dispatching the couple.

The notion that the manager and his cronies, as amateur filmmakers, might be fostering and harvesting the suspense gets set aside a little too early, but that reflects the film’s spare, focused approach. Thankfully, “Vacancy” suggests but does not press the inevitable syllogism to the thriller that we ourselves are watching.

“Vacancy” proves to be an unremarkable detour for Mr. Wilson and Ms. Beckinsale, who flee murderers as well as anyone, I suppose. For Mr. Antal, the small-scale thriller is the ideal studio warm-up, and what filmmaker could turn down a video-age twist on the voyeurism of “Psycho”? As a satisfactory piece of genre work, his film is not to be sneezed at, but it fails to break out beyond that.