In “The Exterminating Angels,” a middle-aged filmmaker auditions a few young women by inviting them to pleasure themselves in front of him. He observes them first individually, then in pairs, and eventually three entwined together. Among his earnest goals is to capture “the grace of the pleasure on their faces and bodies.” He does not participate other than to observe.

Most art films of this ilk, the kind that “explore” sexuality, recall the comedy routine about a guy half-admiring and half-aroused by a photo of a beautiful nude model: First he finds it interesting, then very interesting, then very, very interesting, and then, suddenly, not so interesting. Arty voyeurism, no matter how trumped up in terms of dissecting male gazes or liberating raw desire, all too often melts away in the afterglow, amounting to tiresome taboo-tweaking, brand new dogmas, or nothing at all.

Jean-Claude Brisseau’s film, his first since 2002’s similarly graphic “Secret Things,” sails past its outwardly ridiculous premise into uncharted realms to achieve mesmerizing intensity, voluptuous beauty, and a surprising spirituality. Sure, the potent erotic charge doesn’t hurt in focusing our attention, but Mr. Brisseau has done more here than elicit extravagant exposure from his actors. In its meta-cinematic commentary, it may even be one of the season’s more cerebral endeavors.

Francois (Frédéric van den Driessche) is the fearless filmmaker, a naïve hero in his steadfast investigation of body and spirit but also something of a cipher. After rejections from several nonplussed actors, and one auditionee who eventually accuses him of traumatizing her (more on that later), he ends up doing innumerable test runs with the volatile Charlotte (Maroussia Dubreuil) and the more docile Julie (Lise Bellynck). A waitress, Stéphanie (Marie Allan), signs up after witnessing the other women pleasuring each other on a table in one of the more public experiments.

The action of the film, so to speak, threads together a progression of sumptuously shot sexual encounters in a spare, elegant Parisian rented room with Francois’s wrangling of the young women and glimpses of his marital travails. Over this carnality, in a typically mad stroke of genius, Mr. Brisseau casts a supernatural pall. In bookends to the film and many individual scenes, dark-angel apparitions wink in and out of view in the shadows, commenting on and influencing the proceedings. Cryptic radio transmissions, in the manner of Jean Cocteau’s 1950 classic “Orphee,” buzz portentous pronouncements from the great beyond.

Mr. Brisseau’s earnestness and control suggest these layers of unreality and delirious passion as transcendent phenomena at the edge of reason. As the shooting of Francois’s film finally gets under way, Charlotte’s near-demonic instability adds another dimension, and the film’s grueling final chapter, in which the police take interest in Francois’s project, has the feel of violent social forces explosively unleashed.

The film hums with the paradoxes of its own creation, because every other sex scene, observed alongside Francois, is effectively about its own making. Glomming on to the fantasies and pleasures of the young women seems to bring us at once closer and further away from their private experiences of desire. It’s in this unattainability, pushing the same limits posed by capturing spirituality, that all the arched backs and flushed cheeks become something more. A reference to the 17th-century French dramatist Pierre Corneille, controversial in his own time, suggests the classical lineage of Mr. Brisseau’s experiments in performance and verisimilitude.

It probably doesn’t help Mr. Brisseau in the eyes of cynics, however, that art may be imitating life here in uncomfortable ways. After making “Secret Things,” the director was convicted of harassing four auditioning actresses for requesting — stop me if you’ve heard this one — that they masturbate to demonstrate their sexual openness. The record shows that Mr. Brisseau conceived “The Exterminating Angels” before the sordid affair, but it inevitably adds another charged dimension, sharpening the uneasy questions of authority and vulnerability within the movie’s own story.

Francois “will always be clueless,” says one character of his folly. Mr. Brisseau’s sophisticated orchestration prevents a similar evaluation of the director, as do the flashes of humor and twinkles of amusement flashing across Francois’s eyes. And there are no lectures here, though Mr. Brisseau is, in fact, a former schoolteacher. He’s simply made his movie with the flamboyant, bracing single-mindedness of someone who never even thought to look back.

Beginning tonight at the IFC Center (323 Sixth Ave. at West 3rd Street, 212-924-7771).