If the French psychological thriller of sorts “Poison Friends” were to be remade in Hollywood, there probably would be a murder, and a car chase — preferably as product placement for a new American-brand model — and the mostly male dynamic would be rejiggered to showcase the movie’s new star: Lindsay Lohan.

But the film’s twisty narrative about a deceptive graduate student in a Paris university and the circle of friends he manipulates like hand puppets is so thoroughly French that it’s almost impossible to imagine it in translation. The academic milieu that is director Emmanuel Bourdieu’s natural habitat seems to exist only in a country where intellectuals and novelists are regarded as rock stars.

“The student dreams of being the big intellectual and becoming involved in politics,” Mr. Bourdieu said, speaking by phone from Paris. “My world was this one and we were all dreaming like that. It is a bit childish, I think, but I like this world.”

Mr. Bourdieu was a graduate student in the mid-1990s when he met the director Arnaud Desplechin through a mutual friend. Mr. Desplechin was looking for some help with a screenplay he was writing about a young academic with an epic case of writer’s block and a prolific talent for bedding women. The film, “My Sex Life (Or How I Got Into an Argument),” secured Mr. Desplechin’s reputation as a visionary filmmaker and introduced Mr. Bourdieu to the movie business as screenwriter.

“At first, he gave me 200 pages he had already written,” Mr. Bourdieu said, happy to note that he was a far more successful academic than the character, Paul, whose doctoral dissertation is perpetually stalled. “My contribution was only writing notes, making suggestions, like a dramaturge.” Eventually, Mr. Bourdieu began to write his own dialogue, drawing on his experiences to add shadings to Mr. Desplechin’s collection of promiscuous, discursive friends and lovers. He went on to co-write the underappreciated gem “Esther Kahn” (2000) with the director before shooting his first full-length feature, “Vert Paradise,” in 2003.

“Poison Friends” returns Mr. Bourdieu to the world he abandoned. The film spins around the charismatic comparative literature scholar Andre (Thibault Vinçon), a fast-talking alpha-dog with an opinion about everything and a natural arrogance that chips away at any resistance. He deploys his dubious charms to gain an almost uncanny hold over a tight-knit group of young men. His magnetic allure pulls strongest on Eloi (Malik Zidi), a budding writer who is insecure about his gifts and feels overshadowed by his mother, an author so famous she has gossipy best sellers published about her.

Mr. Vinçon infuses more than a touch of Shakespearean villainy into a role that was conceived to be as physical as intellectual. “One of my preoccupations with Andre is that he is always talking and moving,” Mr. Bourdieu said. “When he enters a room, he doesn’t say hello. He’s already talking to you. Suddenly, he is taking you somewhere, to a bar or to a girl, and you don’t have time to decide if you should go or not. You are doing it anyway.”

It is easy for an audience to see through André’s pretensions — his fixation on the crime novelist James Ellroy verges on a parody of high-flown French theorizing about American pop culture — but it takes some time for his agenda to become clear. Mr. Bourdieu’s love for saturated speech makes for dialogue rhythms that outpace the movie’s subtitles, but his intimate framing makes up the difference: For a film in which so much is given to the inner life of monkish baby intellectuals, there’s a surplus of emotional nuance. Indeed, Mr. Bourdieu succeeds in making you care enough about his boys’ club to induce a pervasive anxiety, even though nothing really life-threatening is about to happen. He just makes you feel as though there might be.

“Many times in my life I have met this kind of person, this influence,” Mr. Bourdieu said, alluding to Andre, who for all his sociopathic intent prods his acolytes toward their ambitions, acting as a catalyst. “I can’t say if it’s good or bad, but they shape you. Afterward you can say it was something ridiculous. You can say, ‘I was a child.’ But during it, it’s like a dream. You can’t get outside of it.”