An Aboriginal fable that gently unwinds for a hypnotic hour-and-a-half, the magic-infused “Ten Canoes” takes the notion of narrative on a walkabout. It’s a yarn-within-a-yarn and then some, immersed in a native tongue and tone that saturates the viewer in uncut ethnographic funk. The film is awash in folksy lyricism and rough humor, its cultural codes seeping into the consciousness like the brackish swamp water its wooden vessels float through.

Those canoes have been dutifully fashioned from tree bark as members of a Yolngu tribe in the Northern Territory of Australia head out on their annual hunt for goose eggs. It is, a puckish narrator (the Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil) intones, before a chortle, a time “long, long ago in a place far, far away”: a thousand years, at least, before Westerners materialized on the rugged landscape. The men’s journey is long and physically taxing. It is also dangerous: The marshy terrain is populated by alligators, which require the hunters to build sleeping platforms in thickets of trees. To entertain themselves as they mush and paddle, they tell stories — really, really, really long stories.

The story Australian director Rolf de Heer has chosen to recast, with English voice-overs and subtitles for Ganalbingu — a language whose rhythms have a captivating vibrancy — is a revenge drama meant to teach about the perils of misjudgment. “Be careful what you wish for” is its message. An elder, Minygululu, who has three wives, intends to cool the ardor of the young bachelor, Dayindi (Jamie Gulpilil, the narrator’s son, who resembles an Aborginal Andre Benjamin). The kid has an eye on Minygululu’s third and most beautiful wife. So the elder begins telling a story from a time before time, about a village leader, his three wives, his lustful baby brother — and a mysterious stranger.

As the saga unfolds, Mr. de Heer’s conceptual gifts make the exposition a constant delight and surprise. He uses the same Aborginal cast of non-actors for both the film’s present and past, doubling the characters in a sense, shooting the former in stark black-and-white and the latter in lush color. Both are sumptuously filmed by cinematographer Ian Jones, who evokes a celebrated photographic series made in 1937 by the Australian anthropologist Donald Thomson. The camera’s movements are deliberately mapped. Slow tracking shots and stationary frames observe the storytelling tribesmen, while the flashbacks are captured by a lens in fluid motion, snaking in and around the action, almost from the stalker’s perspective in a 1970s horror film.

Perhaps emulating the Aborginal sense of time as a kind of boundless continuum, as well as spiritual beliefs in the migration of ancestral souls, the film’s separate halves continually dissolve into and out of each other. This tactic might seem to make a dense and complex enterprise even more so, but it actually makes it easier to assimilate the Yolngu arcana.

The rich performances that Mr. de Heer elicits from his non-professional cast (who determined their own roles based on the strict lineage rules of the Yolngu: The kinship relationships between two actors in the film had to be the same as the relationships between the characters they were playing) also contribute mightily to the film’s enveloping drama. Often with little more than a still shot and crisp editing, the director can convey the desired effect, while the story gradually loops backward and forward.

Since so much of “Ten Canoes” abides in the small details and intimate rhythms of their revelation, it’s shameful to outline more than the basics. In the cautionary tale, the village leader, Ridjimiraril, gets spooked by a stranger who briefly visits his people, and may have cast a spell on him — which seems to be as easy as finding some carelessly deposited excrement in the woods and setting it on fire. When one of Ridjimiraril’s three wives disappears, everyone suspects this unknown sorcerer, but it’s only later when the men gather their spears to track him down, with tragic results. Through it all, the longing of Yeeralparil, the troubled leader’s little brother, for his youngest wife, is played like a chorus — and a comic rejoinder.

The great beauty of “Ten Canoes” is not only photographic and linguistic. The film also abides in its potent display of ritual and communal ethics, filtered through a refreshing commitment to presenting the real deal. A good story must be told properly, the narrator insists, and “Ten Canoes” does just that.

Mel Gibson, take note.