What’s in a name? Like all things, it depends on where you’re coming from. For the average moviegoer, if the name is a mouthful like Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and it comes attached to a maker of unusual experimental movies, it can only sound like one thing: difficulty. Fortunately, the Thai filmmaker to whom it belongs is not only a supremely rewarding artist, but a singularly humble one as well.

While studying film at the Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. Weerasethakul (as Thai nomenclature and newspaper decorum would have me write it) took to calling himself Joe. What to call his movies is a knottier issue. “Mysterious Object at Noon” is a slippery mix of documentary and drama that wends it way through the landscapes and mindscapes of rural Thailand. The daisy-chain structure of interlocking vignettes was inspired by the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse, and its formal strategies are aligned with both neorealism and the avant-garde, but his boldly original debut looks and feels like nothing else.

If “Mysterious Object” pushed the envelope of narrative normalcy, “Blissfully Yours” tore it to shreds and scattered the pieces in the jungle of Thai land. Mr. Weerasethakul’s sophomore masterpiece begins as a sharply observed urban study of a Burmese immigrant, his girlfriend, and an older woman who looks after them. There is a visit to the doctor, a bit of shopping, a shift at the local tchotchke factory.

Then something magical happens. Forty minutes into the movie, as two of the characters drive out to the countryside for a picnic, the credit sequence suddenly kicks in to the strains of a giddy Thai pop song. It’s a delightful, disarming invention, this quirky reloading of the narrative. Dissolving the geometry of its opening section, the film then plunges deep into the flux of nature, observing its characters as they wander through thick vegetation, laze about in streams, soak up the afternoon sun. Mr. Weerasethakul pushes the duration of his shots to the limit of tolerance and beyond, altering our sense of time and perspective. “Blissfully Yours,” indeed: This is one of the genuinely transcendent films of our time.

Had he stopped right there, this young filmmaker (he’s barely 30) would be a major figure in contemporary cinema. But now we have “Tropical Malady,” the first of his films to receive a proper theatrical release in America, and the case for his work has only grown clearer. Mr. Weerasethakul is the most exciting new director in the world, period. He’s the real deal, an authentic visionary who’s pushing the art of cinema to places it’s never been.

Another mysterious object of a movie, “Tropical Malady” replicates and extends certain structural ideas from “Blissfully Yours.” The first part, devoted to the relationship between two young men, is largely set in Bangkok. The second takes place in the dark jungle night, and tells the story (myth? legend? parable? dream?) of a soldier pursuing an ancient spirit in the shape of a tiger.

Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee) is a simple country boy employed at an ice-cutting shop. Keng (Banlop Lamnoi) is a soldier on leave. Together, they hang out in town, go the movies, and visit the countryside. They appear to be falling in love. Mr. Weerasethakul delineates the contour of their relationship with a delicacy bordering on the ambiguous; it’s hard to know where bonhomie leaves off and eros begins.

It can also be easy to overlook how rife with incipient transformation this initial, apparently naturalistic section is. In a striking early passage of the film, Tong walks alone down a bustling street. Photographed on the sly, it’s the sort of short you might see in a film of the nouvelle vague: The “plot” of the actor enables the camera to unobtrusively record a passage of daily street life. At the end of the shot, Tong notices a large rottweiler propped on its hind legs, paw extended to its owner.

Tong gets on a magic bus: The passing streetlights trigger lens flares we should not mistake as meaningless, inadvertent light phenomena. Spirits lurk in the forms of daily life, and cinema can be a means of flushing them out, giving them shape. In the next shot, Tong cuts a block of ice. He pauses, looks directly into the camera. The next image, attached to no identifiable point of view, is a slow zoom over a river landscape, a white swan sculpture looming in the foreground like a manifested demigod.

Through this exacting, effortless blend of (magic) realism and evocative visual poetry, Mr. Weerasethakul charges his narrative with metamorphic energies. The movie begins with a quote from Japanese novelist Ton Nakajima: “All of us are by nature wild beasts. Our only duty as humans is to become like trainers who keep their animals in check, and even teach them to perform tricks alien to their bestiality.” Watchful eyes will see this theme subtly deployed throughout the film.

At the midway point, Tong and Keng motorcycle along a country road at night. They stop – and something new begins. This crucial scene is much too enchanting to ruin with description. Suffice to say, it’s one of the weirder consummations in movie history. Tong disappears into the shadows. Keng, in a state of bliss, rides off under a battery of street lamps curved like the neck of a swan.

After spinning down into utter darkness, “Tropical Malady” re-emerges radically transformed. Welcome to the jungle. Time is suspended, spirits walk the earth, psychic monkeys climb down from the canopy to discuss the rules of the game. A broad, moonlit tree shimmers with phantom fireflies. The pale green ghost of a bull rises and disappears into the night. It’s as if Charles Burchfield and Henri Rousseau were adapting a screenplay by the Thai reincarnation of Ovid.

The two parts of “Tropical Malady,” like those of “Mulholland Drive” and “In Praise of Love,” interact in an intuitive alchemy of the imagination, their forms and meanings prodigiously cross-fertilizing. Simply put, the movie is a queer kind of love story. On another level, it dramatizes states of being on the threshold of transformation. In its furthest depths, the picture stirs with the generative energies of love and myth, feeling and representation. Like all the great visionaries, Mr. Weerasethakul guides his audience toward the infinite, indicating a territory beyond words, sounds, or images. “Tropical Malady” expands and invigorates the cinema.