There was mild surprise from Cannes last year when the Palme d’Or went to “L’Enfant” (The Child). It was the second Palme in six years for Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne – a feat all the more impressive when one considers that these remarkable, Belgium-based brothers have been in the critical spotlight for less than a decade.

Call it a referendum on the directors’ distinctive methods: In a spare, immediate style that has drawn comparisons to the work of their acknowledged model, Robert Bresson, the Dardennes have specialized in stark parables exploring the nature of family, loyalty, transgression, and forgiveness. Naturalistic where Bresson was allusive, they work with a handheld, claustrophobic verite technique that – at times almost literally – has the effect of putting the viewer in the protagonist’s shoes.

Deepening and complicating their last three films, “L’Enfant” plays like a rejoinder to the Dardennes’ breakthrough, “La Promesse” (1996), whose young hero (Jeremie Renier) decided his promise to a dying immigrant trumped his loyalty to his father. “L’Enfant” looks at the paternal bond from a different angle: The film stars a now-grown Mr. Renier as Bruno, a 20-year-old thief suddenly confronted with the challenge of parenthood when his 18-year-old girlfriend brings home their baby boy.

In the opening sequence, Bruno’s presence is suggested only by his absence: After climbing a stairway with her newborn in tow, Sonia (Deborah Francois) finds that Bruno has sublet her apartment for the next two days. An impulsive, posturing smooth talker, his face riddled with acne, Bruno – who needs to be reminded to kiss his son – is still something of a child himself. He even hangs out with local street urchins, a false family whose petty criminal activities distract Bruno from his duties as a father. (Their cell phone calls to him become a recurring, increasingly horrifying motif.)

To Bruno, the baby is just another commodity, as impersonal as the apartment, his jacket, or his phone. But in the Dardennes’ vision, the child, named Jimmy, is something Bruno has never encountered before: It’s a being he made, the symbol of a holy union. (Indeed, the fact that Bruno seems to have been oblivious to his girlfriend’s pregnancy suggests some sort of immaculate conception.) Even signing his name to a birth certificate – a physical assignation of his parental role – can’t give Bruno a sense of Jimmy’s essential irreplaceability.

Wringing drama from the mundane is a Dardenne trademark, and simple scenes of Bruno pushing Jimmy’s carriage around the Belgian city of Seraing – roughhousing the pram to get it on and off a bus – acquire an almost breathtaking level of suspense. The Dardennes’ technique isn’t as showy, or voyeuristic, as in the Palme-winning “Rosetta” (1999) or their masterful “The Son” (2002), which were both filmed in startling proximity to their main actors’ heads. Here, the camera is less obtrusive, but every movement counts. A pan showing Bruno posing by the roadside, frighteningly distant from his son, carries an uninflected chill.

Without giving it a thought, Bruno discreetly – and almost imperceptibly – sells Jimmy on the black market. (“We’ll have another,” he announces to Sonia.) Then, confronted with his error, he quickly – mild spoiler – manages to buy Jimmy back. Yet as with the counterfeit money in Bresson’s “L’Argent” (1983), the crime, no matter how rapidly covered up, unleashes a poison that corrodes all subsequent action.

To undo his transgression, Bruno piles sin upon sin: Countering Sonia’s complaints to the police, Bruno tells an officer (Dardennes regular Olivier Gourmet) that his girlfriend was simply insane, and even denies his paternity. To account for his son’s temporary absence, he pays an overdue visit to his mother and cajoles her into confirming his alibi – a story that implicates Bruno’s friends. The debt also needs to be repaid financially, with Bruno now required to visit his black-market thugs every Sunday – as if going to church – slowly paying off the 5,000 euros they claim he owes them.

Bruno’s salvation thus becomes his damnation; instead of redeeming Bruno from a life of crime, Jimmy’s existence now forces him to become a bigger criminal. Nothing can compensate for the mistrust he creates in Sonia (who, for all her virtue, is still a teenager). But Bruno’s lies awake in him a new sense of guilt, and he repents by serving as a father figure for a protege thief (Jeremie Segard), climaxing in a powerful, almost baptismal sequence that functions as a metaphor for conversion.

As uncompromising as “L’Enfant” may be, the Dardennes bring a measure of hopefulness to their Bressonian (and Dostoyevsky-influenced) narrative of transgression and punishment. Their visceral camerawork may not flatter their subjects, but at the root of their sensibility is a genuine strain of sympathy. Working a variation on the ending of Bresson’s “Pickpocket” (1959), the Dardennes close “L’Enfant” with an embrace. The gesture is too little, and too late – but it isn’t final.