The docudrama “Zoo,” opening at the IFC Center, arrives nearly overpowered by its tabloid inspiration — an infamously detailed 2005 case of ill-fated bestiality. One summer night in Enumclaw, Wash., a man with a ruptured colon was dumped at the town hospital. Police uncovered an underground community of “zoophiles” who met regularly at a local ranch. There the deceased spent his last night on Earth being mortally penetrated by a trussed-up stallion.

“Zoo” attempts to find poetry and pathos in a taboo practice that typically provokes outrage. The filmmaker, Robinson Devor, presents the Enumclaw zoophiles and the run-up to the incident in question with ethereally photographed, dreamlike re-enactments and audio drawn exclusively from interviews with participants. Edenic Pacific Northwest environs are presented as the setting not for debased bacchanalia but for secret communion among individuals who seek solace and belonging in strange love.

This is not a simple proposition, but though bold, “Zoo,” which made its premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, does not spring from an urge to shock or titillate. Indeed, it falls right in line with Mr. Devor’s last work, the near-mystical “Police Beat,” a character study of a lovelorn cop that interweaves actual mondo news items into a background tapestry of human oddities.

Edited according to a similarly mesmerizing dream logic, “Zoo” is like one of the outré stories in “Police Beat,” elevated and treated on its own terms. (For both movies, Mr. Devor collaborated with the writer Charles Muddede, who once had a newspaper police-blotter column.)

Still, there is something deeply, and perhaps inevitably, unsatisfying about “Zoo.” Moralizers may dismiss the film out of hand, but even indulging Mr. Devor’s exploration of radically different experience presents a vexing void that the earnestly confided feelings of the zoophiles cannot bridge.

“Zoo” will disappoint anyone looking for psychological inroads into the zoophiliac mindset (or, for that matter, man-horse union, which is barely glimpsed on a TV in one shot). The self-styled “zoos,” who take nicknames like the victim’s moniker, “Mr. Hands,” express circular sounding desires for community that could just as easily come out of the mouths of lonely video-gamers. Details of Mr. Hands’s conventional life as a divorced engineer with a beloved son seem only more befuddling.

Mr. Devor’s most powerful strategy is instead aesthetic. At first blush, his ravishing visuals might express the zoophiles’ intimations of sublime love and bucolic transport, and engender a kind of sensual empathy. But the spell cast by this film doesn’t come from the zoophiles. Mr. Devor’s subjectivity feels imposed and willfully obscure. There is a nagging disconnect between his virtuoso filmmaking and the reliance on the zoos for elucidation, which constrains what the film can say and do.

Mr. Devor does introduce dissenting voices. The animal rescuer who picks up the horses involved in the incident offers periodic outsider reality checks: She finds it odd, for example, when, during her visit, one horse runs up and starts fellating another horse.

“Zoo” also draws provocative comparisons between the zoophiles’ animal love and more conventional friendship with animals. Loving testimonies come from the animal rescuer and the wealthy retired couple whose ranch caretaker staged the zoo parties. The zoophiles’ intense emotional bonds with the horses, if not their physical ones, are not out of place in a country that increasingly anthropomorphizes its pets as something like starter children.

All of which might sound like pussyfooting around to viewers for whom bestiality is a straightforward matter of morality. The disconnect among some of the zoophiles is certainly unsettling. One, in a disturbing echo of many pedophiles, maintains that the horses are often the instigators; another claims that there is “no bondage involved in this,” even though this group’s practices entail immobilizing and suspending the animal. Most amazing is the short shrift given the two men (here reduced to one) who abandoned the dying Mr. Hands at the hospital.

“Zoo” is nonetheless worth seeing, even if it fails to cohere. Its thought-provoking utopian interest in beasts and sexuality might suggest a combination of “Grizzly Man” and David Cronenberg’s “Crash.” And you probably won’t find a film out now that triggers a post-viewing discussion — of matters emotional, aesthetic, philosophical, and, uh, logistical — quite like this one.