The first thing you notice while watching “Fay Grim” is that just about every shot is crooked. The camera records the action — people talking, mostly — at a canted angle, as if the man behind it, writer-director Hal Hartley, were ironically cocking his head. Viewers of this talky, convoluted thriller may well do some inquisitive head-tilting of their own: What the heck is going on? Why is nobody acting? Where is the nearest exit?

For more than 20 years now, Mr. Hartley has clung to a stubbornly uncommercial style, and it must be said that he is that rare filmmaker with a cinema all his own. It is a prolix, smarty-pants kind of cinema, sometimes smug and almost always opaque, but that’s not really the point. The point is that Mr. Hartley is an auteur, one who owns every inch of the austere mise-en-scene — he often has sets stripped, not designed — as completely as he owns the wan rhapsodies of his scripts, not to mention his performers, who often act as if they just came out of a coma. (Mr. Hartley’s 1994 film “Amateur” even managed to dull Isabelle Huppert’s razor edge.)

In his 1997 film “Henry Fool,” about a garbage man (James Urbaniak) who is inspired by a literary hobo (Thomas Jay Ryan) to become an award-winning poet, Mr. Hartley punched a hole into that vacuum-sealed world and let something vital creep in. Gone was the airtight wall of irony. Characters, even minor ones, were allowed to breathe and show they had souls, and a moving exploration of genius began to take shape.

No such luck in “Fay Grim,” the freeze-dried sequel to “Henry Fool.” How to describe it? A bland litany of anti-establishment nonsense and flat maybe-jokes, recited by androids.

Henry, the grandiose would-be writer who fled the country at the end of the previous film, has long been presumed dead. But now the CIA is convinced he’s alive, and that he has knowledge of covert American actions all over the world. Are his unpublished memoirs — dismissed by his would-be editor (Chuck Montgomery) as eight volumes of “illogical, pedantic, contradicting” gibberish — actually chock full of state secrets? An agent named Fulbright (Jeff Goldblum) sends Henry’s wife Fay (Parker Posey) abroad to find out.

Outfitted in a black trench coat that’s straight out of the “Matrix,” Fay heads to Paris and makes contact with various spies, including a willowy British agent (Saffron Burrows) who seems to have stepped off a catwalk. (Gag, or gratuitous beautiful woman? It’s not clear.) Fay eventually runs into a former lover of Henry’s (Elina Lowensohn) who claims to have sold his notebooks to some Turkish gangsters. With Western intelligence agencies following her every move, Fay proceeds to Istanbul, where she meets the radical Islamist (Anatole Taubman) who will lead her to Henry.

Fay, half-animated by a casually sexy Ms. Posey, starts off as a fish out of water (her struggles with a vibrating cell phone provide brief entertainment) but quickly develops a knack for the spy game, or at least this film’s version of it — a cloakand-dagger-less affair played by people whose minds seem to be elsewhere. Mr. Goldblum’s agent, with his mussed hair and open collar, looks like he just got back from a bender.

Fay’s true goal is to keep her husband and his writings out of government hands, and the terrorist honcho, the film’s only serious character, turns out to be on her side. (Mr. Hartley’s pretentious outlaw sympathies are also embedded in one of Henry’s coded communiqués: “He who speaks the truth is always in trouble.”)

“Fay Grim” contains the basic elements of an espionage thriller, but Mr. Hartley has something else in mind, and suspense isn’t it. What is it, then? That’s hard to discern with a director who clearly deems obfuscation a virtue and rarely removes his tongue from his cheek. Perhaps if he told us, he’d have to kill us. After enough of his coy verbiage and off-kilter camera angles, that actually starts to sound like a fair deal.