Before you cue up The Whistlers for video on demand, have your beverage and snacks at hand and be prepared to be glued to screen for 97 minutes. I say that in part because The Whistlers is a gripping drama of crime and corruption and in part because the film borders on being interactive: It takes your upmost concentration — any maybe a fellow viewer or two to consult with — to put together exactly what crimes Romanian police detective Cristi is investigating, and who exactly is corrupt.

The film starts in the Spanish Canary Islands (its rather lame original title is La Gomera, the name of one of the islands), where Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) has just arrived to meet up with a fellow Romanian, the beautiful Gilda (Catrinel Marlon, pictured above). She pairs him with a grizzled local man, who starts to teach him a language made up of nothing but variations on whistling — the purpose of which it takes a long while to figure out (but the wait is worth it).

From there, the film moves slowly forward but spends much of its time in flashbacks, introducing a rogues’ gallery of other characters: Cristi’s icy police boss, Magda (the wonderful Rodica Lazar); a young businessman Magda wants investigated, Zsolt (Sabin Tambrea); and a lot of other cops and crooks and loose ends. Even the opera-obsessed clerk at a local hotel used as a safe house — everyone’s home and office is presumed bugged — is more than he seems.

Some fans of Romanian writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu have complained the The Whistlers is a mere genre film, from an artist acclaimed for his previously more avant garde, socially relevant works, such as the acclaimed Police, Adjective. As an ignorant American who hasn’t seen Porumboiu’s previous works, I took The Whistlers at face value, as a deadpan but often funny, always dark, sometimes violent caper drama in which the precise nature of the caper remains ever elusive.

(One scene requires an explanation: When an American film director interrupts a gangster meeting in a big, empty building on the Canary Islands [photo below], it’s an allusion to the making of Solo: A Star Wars Story, the production of which took over one of the islands for many months a few years ago, much to locals’ dismay.)

While you’re busy trying to figure out who’s aligned with whom — and whether any of millions of dollars often discussed actually exists, much less where it might be — you’ll also find a deep humanity to the movie. The main characters all gradually reveal just enough about their personal lives to unite them in a the kind of suppressed desperation common in a nation under constant surveillance. The best of them are motivated, it turns out, as much by a need for connection as by greed or a hunger for power. Thus the film’s surprisingly poetic finale is mostly about the promise of unmitigated human contact.

Grade: B-plus. Not rated, but an R equivalent. Not available on demand from the website of Asheville’s Fine Arts Theater and Grail Moviehouse. Online rentals benefit the theaters.

(Photos courtesy of mk2 Films; top photo by Vlad Cioplea)