Daft Punk’s feature film debut, “Electroma,” proves that the French electronic duo’s recent exploration of robot alter egos isn’t just shtick. In fact, “Electroma,” out today on DVD, feels like a culmination of themes the duo has explored since its 2005 album “Human After All,” such as the wonderfully frustrating and tragic experience of being alive.

Fans of Daft Punk’s bubbly, bass-heavy, and dance floor-ready beats and melodic pop should bear in mind that none of the group’s music is featured in the movie. Music, however, is featured very prominently in this dialogue-free story. There is everything from 1970s rock to classical études, but none of it was created by Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. Instead, Messrs. Bangalter and de Homem-Christo co-directed and co-wrote (along with Paul Hahn and Cédric Hervet) the movie, which begins as a bizarre road saga and slowly wanders into eerie and surprisingly moving territory.

Actors Peter Hurteau and Michael Reich play “Daft Punk” in the movie — aka Hero #1 and Hero #2 — two robots outfitted in black leather motorcycle jackets, a style Mssrs. Bangalter and de Homem-Christo wore in their 2005 video for “Robot Rock.” The duo climbs into a black sports car boasting a license plate that reads “human” and begins driving through the wide, arid highways of what looks like the American Southwest. The scene is scored to Todd Rundgren’s progressive-rock gem “International Feel,” off his 1973 album “A Wizard, a True Star.”

It’s a curious beginning, feeling more like a music video than a narrative film. As they drive along, the camera tracks the landscape ripping by, offering an impression of loose, carefree joy. And then they pass a tractor, also driven by a robot, at which point “Electroma” begins its slow descent into madness.

The pair drive through a small town that is as picturesque as a Norman Rockwell painting — kids at a playground, a couple getting married at the Pioneer Memorial Church, a couple doing yard work inside their picket fence, customers filing into the Pine Café. It’s an image of stereotypical small-town America, save for one obvious, almost ludicrous detail — the town is populated entirely by robots.

This sequence offers the sort of visual images that could easily slide into sketch-comedy parody, but as accompanied by Brian Eno’s chilly ambient track “In Dark Trees,” the tone is more serious and unsettling. It is as if two heroes are the proverbial travelers wandering into a small town where they might not be wanted. It’s a suspicion that becomes more and more inevitable once the pair drive to a lab to have their robot heads covered in makeshift human faces.

Yes, the robot heroes enter an all-white laboratory environment where a viscous, flesh-tone substance is poured over their metallic helmets and shaped into these large humanoid heads with exaggerated faces. They end up looking like creates from a puppet theater, and when they leave the lab and start walking through the town — scored to Curtis Mayfield’s funky strut “Billy Jack” — the effect is simultaneously hilarious and horrific, both for the sheer visual oddity of these fake-faced robots and the startled “looks” they receive from the townsfolk as they pass.

What’s most impressive about “Electroma” is how seductively Mssrs. Bangalter and de Homem-Christo draw a viewer into their movie’s make-believe world. Without any title cards, subtitles, or voice-over narration, the story’s plot points start to accrue the narrative pull of a full-scale drama. Granted, this story isn’t convoluted — robots get human faces, scare local robot population — but it’s achieved with emotional ripples, comic moments, and genuine senses of surprise and wonder. And they’re doing it without the most basic element of cinematic emotion, the expressive human face. Here, blank, reflective visors are the only surfaces encountered for the typical reaction shots, and yet somehow the movie’s moments of fear, astonishment, and bewilderment are still conveyed.

Out in the sun, the two heroes’ faces begin to melt and run off their helmets, causing the local robots to chase them out of town. And in one of the movie’s many sublime moments of poignancy, the pair hide in a gas station restroom, staring at their reflections. Their fake eyes, ears, and mouths have become gruesome fleshy smears, and they’re forced to abandon them to blend in once again and walk out of town.

Daft Punk explored this mask theme in its video for “Prime Time of Your Life,” in which a perfectly normal little girl wants to look like what she perceives to be her skeletal friends and family. It’s a disturbing video, and the idea is expanded in “Electroma” to even more profoundly sad extremes. Throughout the movie, a soundless close-up of flames occupies the screen for a brief spell, as if a glimpse of something still to come. When it’s finally explained by the movie, it becomes this haunting foreshadowing, a final puzzle piece that recasts the topsy-turvy emotional journey of the entire movie. And what starts out as a curiously odd film becomes something quite unsuspected. It feels very much like a 1970s movie exploring some metaphysical angst. Think of “Electroma” as equal parts “THX 1138” and “Zabriskie Point” — a meditation on the terrible vulnerability of being human and alone in this world, told entirely with robots. It might not be what Daft Punk’s fans were expecting to see, but in its own powerful way, it’s a minor masterpiece of personal filmmaking.