Life, being what it is, had me scrambling out of the preview for “Pacifiction” just minutes before the film was set to roll. An appointment barely remembered conflicted with the running time and, begging the grace of patient PR folks, I requested a screening link.

“There’s nothing like seeing a movie on the big screen,” I was reminded while sprinting out the door. It’s a sentiment in which I firmly believe and to which I usually adhere.

Sure enough, sequestered on my sofa later in the day watching the panoramic opening of “Pacifiction,” the latest effort from Spanish writer and director Albert Serra, I hankered for a screen bigger than the one at my disposal. The silhouette of a distant mountain range — located, as the film later discloses, in Tahiti — is suffused in a light that is simultaneously sweet and acidic, its wash of pinkish-purple being the tropical cousin of the keening vistas seen in any number of Hudson River School paintings. 

The idyllic nature of this particular vista was, admittedly, compromised by the accumulation of items situated toward the bottom of the screen: a gridlock of towering cranes, shipping containers stacked four deep, a stray delivery van, and other unlovely necessities of a commercial water front. So much for paradise.

Irony is at work early on in “Pacifiction.” The film’s title — a mash-up of the words “pacific” and “fiction” — underscores the point.

Mr. Serra subsequently escorts us into the seamier precincts on the mainland. We follow a group of sailors to a cavernous nightspot that features indigenous dance performances adapted for the tourist trade and, from all appearances, sexual favors catering to a variety of tastes. Cinematographer Artur Tort, after having lavished attention on the Tahitian sun, brings a palpable grubbiness to the mise en scène once the camera moves inside.

Characters aren’t introduced so much as they wander in and out of our purview. It takes a while before we get our bearings amongst scantily clad showboys, women in native costume, shady clientele, and sundry riff-raff. Two figures are, however, inescapable and bring a welcome degree of stability to a picture that doesn’t consistently navigate between the casual and the listless.

The first is Shannah (a towering Pahoa Mahagafanau), a transgender dancer who radiates a beneficent, but also cagey, good will. The other is De Roller, the French high commissioner of the island. As performed by Benoît Magimel — seen here puffy-faced, burdened by a paunch, and forever wearing sunglasses — De Roller is a glad-handing politician and a paranoid bully, a world weary administrator at the end of his tether. He’s petulant and coarse, an intensely disagreeable figure.

This is one reason to wonder just how necessary it might be to see “Pacifiction” at a theater. Arrant bastards deserve as much square yardage of screen as the next guy, but an encompassing cinematic scope isn’t necessarily conducive to a character study, especially when the character is as mean in spirit and limited in range as our hero. Lawrence of Arabia is one thing; De Roller, quite another. 

The other play on words in the title — “passive” for “pacific” — applies to Mr. Serra’s approach to directing. A charitable soul might peg a movie that lollygags along for close to three hours as “immersive” and wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. Stick with “Pacifiction,” and its bleary sense of time and space does create its own kind of logic. Yet sometimes visionary languor devolves into artistic indulgence. Patience is a virtue, but patience can be tried.

The movie’s overweening bitterness — about commercialism, colonialism, and politics — is rendered more palatable when Mr. Serra and, especially, Mr. Tort concentrate on the sensual splendors of Tahiti: the crystalline waters, the lush vegetation, and the moment when the nightclub dancers transcend kitsch theatrics and truly embody their native traditions. 

Then again, the dancers only do so after De Roller eggs them on. It’s among the most memorable scenes in “Pacifiction” primarily because Mr. Serra’s acerbic tendencies become sharper when he admits to uncomfortable contradictions. 

By the time we reach a final scene in which a navy man spouts the imperatives of unchecked militarism — “Only those who should fear us will see what we’re capable of” — the good director has significantly blunted his moral perspicacity by trading in received nostrums. Leaving the last five minutes on the cutting room floor would do wonders for “Pacifiction.” 

If this distant cousin of “Heart of Darkness” isn’t, in the end, as corrosive as it wants to be, neither should it be dismissed lightly. Mr. Serra is a filmmaker of indisputable gifts and a distinctive vision. Viewers who favor atmosphere over narrative punch will find it rewarding. Those of us who are more cautious in our admiration will hope that Mr. Serra will, in his future endeavors, hire an editor who knows that concision and poetry aren’t mutually exclusive.