Juan Francisco Longoria, left, and Guillermo Lopez with Patricia Reyes Spíndola in Bleak Street (Leisure Time Features)

Bleak Street makes Blue Velvet look like The Sound of Music. Mexican director Arturo Ripstein shares key artistic touches with David Lynch: surreal longueurs, a sense of claustrophobia, settings that feel tawdrily contemporary and enigmatically retro at the same time. But Bleak Street trawls through a far deeper level of brutal desperation than Blue Velvet. Lynchian rays of hope and grace are strictly missing.

Standing barrel-chested at the center of the movie are diminutive twin lucha libre wrestlers (Guillermo Lopez and Juan Francisco Longoria). Never removing their masks, even at home with their long-suffering wives, these two make an unsettling sight: small and childlike from a distance and bristling with adult male violence up close. They not only mirror each other but they perform as Mini-Me doppelgängers to two standard-sized wrestlers, AK-47 and Death; the little men’s stage names are therefore Little AK and Little Death.

Bleak Street establishes the pair motif early on and scatters doubles imagery throughout: back-to-back scenes of couples being harshly awoken from sound sleep; various dyads of exploiters and the exploited; and a duo of aging hard-luck whores who connive to cross paths with the twins in one of the creepiest seduction scenes ever filmed.

Truly outstanding black-and-white cinematography by Alejandro Cantú imbues this work through and through with style and fascination. It takes the high contrast and burnished compositions of film noir and sets them free, deploying deft modern camera movement, complex depth and layering, and impeccably timed choreography. The whole movie looks like a trap: characters prowl elaborate iron staircases, scuttle through alleyways, and sidle into stifling rooms. In a harsh twilight Mexico City where everyone seeks to use each other, night and day feel eerily the same.

Perhaps overrelying on such a distinct look to stay aloft, the film allows itself to slacken in the middle. Elliptical dialogue between characters pads out scenes and reveals little. Themes of degradation grow repetitive. Fortunately, Bleak Street perks up as it tightens from a sordid exploration of the lower depths into a smart crime drama (supposedly based on real events) in the last third of its running time. By the end, you almost feel sympathy for the movie’s coarse, scheming, self-interested lowlifes—almost.