Nearly two decades have passed since Tom Kalin made his last feature as a director. The 1992 drama “Swoon,” a fictionalized version of the Leopold-Loeb murder case, immediately established the filmmaker as an independent talent to be reckoned with. Then … a lot of time passed.

Mr. Kalin was very busy, though. He made a number of short films that often examined the issues of homosexuality and AIDS; produced two other 1990s Sundance favorites, “I Shot Andy Warhol” and “Go Fish”; scripted “Office Killer” for Cindy Sherman, and mentored first-time director John Cameron Mitchell during the preproduction for “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”

Projects came and went, but all along Mr. Kalin was developing a movie based on the sensational case of Barbara Daly Baekeland, an American socialite who was murdered in London by her son Antony in 1972. The victim had been divorced from her husband, Brooks Baekeland, whose fortunes were made by his grandfather, Leo, inventor of Bakelite — aka modern plastic. The family’s saga, rife with infidelity, drugs, suicide attempts, mental illness, and climactic incest between Barbara and her son — whom she hoped to cure of his homosexuality — was the stuff of a classic potboiler. Instead, reporters Natalie Robins and Steven M.L. Aronson made it into their oral history “Savage Grace,” which was first published in 1985. Mr. Kalin read it and was a huge fan.

“It’s shockingly tabloid,” he said recently, sitting in an office at the headquarters of his distributor, IFC Films. “It’s like the Vanity Fair article you read by the swimming pool. But there’s a deeper element of Greek mythology to it.”

The film, which opens next Friday after a full year on the festival circuit, stars Julianne Moore in her most inflammable performance as Barbara, a social-climbing beauty queen who lands a rich husband, but whose poisonous marriage leads her to an unhealthy and obsessive relationship with her son. But the nature of the narrative, with its emphasis on a mutually destructive relationship and a notorious murder case, has typecast Mr. Kalin in a way he’d like to resist.

“I had fully intended to do at least two other films between ‘Swoon’ and this,” he said, “neither of which involved murder or symbiotic relationships.” These included a drama about the relationship between rock singer Patti Smith and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and a biopic on 1960s garage-rock legends the Monks. “It’s part of my interest. It’s not my only interest. But because these are the two movies I’ve done as a director, I’m seen as the guy who does movies about symbiotic relationships that involve power, sex, and class.”

“Savage Grace,” which also stars the British actor Eddie Redmayne as the androgynous Antony (known as Tony), Canadian actor Stephen Dillane as Brooks, and an assortment of Spanish performers, was shot predominantly in southern Spain with a crew drawn from the ranks of Barcelona’s thriving film industry. The postcard vistas are rapturously beautiful, and Mr. Kalin manages to evoke a nostalgia for Europe in the swinging ’60s with minimal contrivance. That visual warmth is deceptive, though, contradicted by the icy-hot impulses that surge through the characters’ veins. It makes for a delicate balancing act.

Screenwriter Howard Rodman’s use of arch, aristocratic language, and his choice to leap across years to pivotal moments in the story — with no connective material between — tends to alienate some viewers.

“It has a very specific attitude toward formal language that was spoken in the upper class,” Mr. Kalin said. “There was no attempt for that dialogue to be a naturalistic patois. I focused on what was an emotional truth underneath what was being said. There’s the formal structure of the language, and then there’s the feeling of what was really going on. I’m not asking you to identify with these characters. I’m asking you to bring empathy. I don’t see them as monsters, but I don’t see them as traditional characters you identify with. That’s a tricky place.”