There is a miracle at the heart of “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.” But no one is raised from the dead, as the punning name in the title might suggest. Romanian director Cristi Puiu’s feat involves something quite the contrary: a 2 1/2 hour-long journey into the night with a pudgy dying retiree who effectively disappears before our eyes. The absorbing film, set in a series of Bucharest emergency rooms, opens today for a two-week run at Film Forum and announces a talent to watch in Mr. Puiu.

One night, Dante Remus Lazarescu (Ion Fiscuteanu), puttering about his housing-block apartment, falls ill. An EMT eventually takes him away, but he ends up being wheeled from one hospital to the next, fading away all the while. Everywhere the doctors and nurses are busy with a recent car pileup. They show indifference, sarcasm, and, sometimes, distracted compassion.

Mr. Puiu’s complex movie is, however, neither a hospital melodrama nor a righteous rant against institutional incompetence. Least of all is it a character study, for this death chronicle’s most striking feature is the gradual disappearance of the protagonist.

We come to know the lump-like Mr. Lazarescu fairly well in the first hour of our acquaintance, which is how long the assured film takes before leaving his apartment. He’s a retired engineer, a tippler, a cat lover, and, when he bothers to mutter, a dispenser of a deadpan sarcasm that is shared by a few other characters, as if distilled over years of communism’s idiocy.

Mr. Puiu steps back to let events unfold and drift, and Lazarescu’s grizzled presence, and soon supine body, become the absence at the center of an all-encompassing view. Doctors, nurses, and other patients come and go, caught through eye-level shots perched in a self-effacing middle distance between reserve and nosiness. Lazarescu’s companion throughout is the indefatigable ambulance EMT (Luminita Gheorghiu), but even she wants to get out of the picture and off work at some point.

Amid an awful game of telephone about his symptoms, the patient himself slowly disappears. His body is visible, even as his spirit drifts away. It’s a decline familiar from other end-game hospital sequences but utterly distinctive here, where the drama of Lazarescu’s existence is thwarted in anti-spectacular, anti-dramatic fashion.

Lazarescu fades away in phases, unable to stand, unable to talk sense, unable to talk, period, in a negation that could come out of a Beckett play. “I say things you don’t understand,” he protests to a nurse in one of his last lucid moments.

No detail of structure, pacing, or dialogue has escaped Mr. Puiu, and yet the strain doesn’t show. The director himself, an actual hypochondriac, has cited the influence of Cassavetes, Wiseman, Rohmer, and Depardon. Here’s someone who understands and even develops his stated inspirations.

This one-man revolution in Romanian cinema sees the film as the first in a series, a la Rohmer’s sextet of “morality tales.” The next is adultery, and, one hopes, he will again find an outstanding cast. Mr. Fiscuteanu and Ms. Gheorghiu happen to be on screen the most, but crucial to the milieu are the many concise and natural sketches of walk-ons, busybodies, and drift-aways.

Of all things, the movie opens and closes with a pair of brassy Romanian pop songs. In the beginning, it’s an ironic cheer that reflects the black humor that snakes through this triumphant art work. By the end, it’s almost a necessary jolt to break the spell cast by the movie.

Until May 9 (209 W. Houston Street, between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8112).