Is it any surprise that the original title of the French film “Heartbeat Detector” — “La Question Humaine” — didn’t make it across the Atlantic intact? It’s hard to think of a Friday night movie proposition more unappetizingly and punishingly European than a 140-minute drama called “The Human Question.” The ads might as well announce that it was directed by a guy with a beret and smelly armpits.

The American title has a more propulsive ring — of course, it’s also completely misleading. Perhaps “Heartbeat Detector” is a medical thriller? Or is it one of those touching movies that really sweetens up a first date? Not exactly. Nicolas Klotz’s film is a brooding, somewhat disappointing story of a psychologist (Mathieu Amalric) who, while investigating the erratic behavior of his company’s CEO (Michael Lonsdale), comes to learn that civilization in postwar Europe is pretty much a big lie. Think of it as the French “Michael Clayton.”

“Heartbeat Detector,” which opens Friday, is a Cinematic Work of Great Importance that takes its time building up to one big idea — namely that the Nazi legacy lives on in the dehumanized corporate hierarchies of 21st-century Europe, and particularly, as one character explains in a long-winded monologue near the end, in the “dead words” and “technical language” that dominate modern existence.

Working from a novel by the Belgian writer François Emmanuel, Mr. Klotz and screenwriter Elisabeth Perceval seem more interested in exploring this thesis than in creating narrative momentum or relatable characters worth caring about. Mr. Klotz’s stylized direction — the camera often remains stationary, even when the object of its attention wanders away, and many shots linger a good 10 seconds longer than one would think necessary — doesn’t add much, except extra running time and the possibility that the cameraman liked to take naps.

To its credit, though, “Heartbeat Detector” starts out with a promising sense of mystery. It also features two of France’s finest living actors: Mr. Amalric, who was virtually unknown on these shores before Julian Schnabel gave him the lead role in last year’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” and Mr. Lonsdale, who played crucial roles in a few high-profile international films in the 1970s (including “Moonraker” and “The Day of the Jackal”) and also worked with François Truffaut and Luis Buñuel.

The two actors shared the screen three years ago in Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” in which they played a father and son in the employ of a shady intelligence-gathering outfit. There are echoes of that relationship here, between Mathias, the tormented German-born CEO played by Mr. Lonsdale, and Simon, the younger, potentially duplicitous psychologist in whom he confides, played by Mr. Amalric. The ursine Mr. Lonsdale, who does world-weary decorum as well as anybody, achieves wonderful moments with eccentric timing. Mr. Amalric, who seems to specialize in bipolar roles, brings a hint of the wild side he exhibited to such great effect in “Diving Bell” and Arnaud Desplechin’s “Kings and Queen,” but his smug, unblinking human-resources whiz is a different breed of Frenchman. Ruthlessly efficient with personnel, Simon fires unproductive employees and subjects others to grueling psychological scrutiny, not to mention some rather extreme role-playing exercises that the film doesn’t quite explain.

But Simon’s iron will is punctured as he gets to know Mr. Lonsdale’s Mathias, an aging high-tech tycoon who once played violin in his company’s quartet and now, in the wake of the company’s successful restructuring, is dangerously obsessed with what Simon describes as “the human question.” After Mathias lets Simon in on a dark secret about the company, the psychologist becomes afflicted by nightmares of Nazi death camps and begins to re-evaluate everything in his life, including the banal memo-speak that has been used to enact everything from layoffs to genocide.

Despite Mr. Amalric’s best efforts, however, Simon isn’t much more than a cipher, and the two women competing for his attention (Laetitia Spigarelli and Delphine Chuillot) barely register. The film aims to indict corporate culture for treating humans as disposable, but it essentially does just that with its characters. (Mr. Lonsdale’s Mathias, who injects every scene he’s in with tangible emotion, is the exception.)

Though not as dreadfully pretentious as Mr. Klotz’s best-known film, “The Bengali Night” — which had a young Hugh Grant learning the deep, dark secrets of India — “Heartbeat Detector” is too intent on proclaiming itself an intellectual film, and ends with a wordy voice-over about the Holocaust. The film discusses the human question in a way that an academic might appreciate. But it never really locates a pulse.