Stills from an unmade movie, false memories, history and fiction are the core of Tracey Moffatt’s My Horizon. She is the first indigenous Australian artist to represent her country at the Venice Biennale since 1997; one of Australia’s best known and internationally exhibited artists, Moffatt’s exhibition is doubly belated.

Two series of photographs and two videos fill the pavilion. One new video, Vigil, also plays on a screen on the building’s outside wall. Close-up stills of white Hollywood stars – including Elizabeth Taylor, Cary Grant, Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, looking aghast and horrified – are intercut with news shots of boats crowded with refugees. Peering through slatted blinds and homing in with binoculars, the wide-eyed and troubled movie characters seem to survey crowded decks. The images of the refugees are manipulated, cropped, recoloured, sometimes reduced to almost abstract blobs. Vigil is short, terse and, with its increasing tempo, extremely powerful. The more you watch, the worse it gets. Stuck in their roles and behind their windows, the stars act out their emotions. Meanwhile, genuine human misery goes on, visibly manipulated for our consumption.

Beyond the sea... Ghost Stills #1. Photograph: Tracey Moffatt

Vigil is the most impressive work in My Horizon. A second video, The White Ghosts Sailed In, looks like a grainy old film, the decayed, scratched footage often reduced to meaningless murk and spoiled celluloid. A scene repeats, again and again: a black and white view of part of Sydney harbour, rocks and cliff and an empty horizon. Shot near the artist’s home, Moffatt has it that this film was made by indigenous people on 26 January 1788, and that she found it in a former aboriginal mission; 26 January is Australia Day. Moffat’s fiction – that indigenous Australians made celluloid film “from melted down pig’s hooves”, and that the camera had once belonged to botanist Sir Joseph Banks, who accompanied Captain Cook on his voyage of discovery in the Endeavour – is, of course, entirely specious.

The scenes of the harbour come and go, replaced by pustular, abstract frames of wrecked footage, over which we hear military drumbeats and a baby’s sudden cry. The white settlers remain over the horizon, an intimation of threat in a drum-roll and a skyline about to be breached. Contained by a distressed old picture frame, the image of the sea is itself enough. The more Moffatt attempts to make us believe, the more she overdoes it.

Tracey Moffatt on My Horizon: ‘The storyline speaks about what is happening in the world today.’ Photograph: PR

Everyone stands stiffly or looks awkward and wooden in Passage, a series of 10 photographs that aspire to the condition of movie poster stills or storyboard clips. But there’s no movie, nor any clear indication of why these people wait, what brings them to these docksides, or why a man in a trilby walks a lonesome street. Glimpsed in a lit window, hands in pockets, he listlessly hangs about, apparently unaware that the building’s burning down, or at least blitzed with fog and artificial light. The same characters appear and reappear. They trudge through machine-generated mist, loiter on corners, smoke and wait. It is all very noirish and overly stylish, like the past redone for Netflix. In the first shot, a mother holds a baby. Later down the line, a gun-toting cop cradles the child, framed by a gate in a barbed wire-topped fence. At dawn and sunset, night and day, the mist rolls, shot through with honeyed light. The cop’s motorcycle is a gleaming, polished prop. “I wanted the 40s-era, film noir images to read as being ‘of the past’, but the storyline speaks about what is happening in the world today, with asylum seekers crossing borders,” Moffatt has said. I see none of this in these images.

The cop, inexplicably, yells in some sort of anguish amid the rigging of a ship. I think this has something to do with the Mutiny on the Bounty. Smoke billows up from below. This is ludicrous. We must supply our own plot, imagine a storyline. Somewhat out of shot, I imagine, his trousers are on fire. The spooky lighting and tricked-up atmosphere don’t add much. I wish they’d go away.

‘Full of sly, unhinging discontinuities’... Bedroom (Body Remembers Series), by Tracey Moffatt. Photograph: Tracey Moffatt

But the photo series Body Remembers – the title taken from Greek poet CP Cavafy – contains powerful images. Moffett herself, dressed in a maid’s uniform, is the sole protagonist. We barely see her face. Seen from behind, and wearing mourning earrings, she stands at the window, looking out. The light on her hair and illuminating her hands seems anomalous and wrong. It is day but the paraffin lamp is lit. Like a Magritte, there’s a sense of disquiet. The light is wrong, the day is wrong, something unseen is wrong.

The series is full of sly, unhinging discontinuities – light cast at the wrong angles, a shadow on a wall that looks more like paint. It probably is paint. The more you look, the more the inconsistencies pile up. The images invoke something more than melancholy or sadness. The maid, her life suspended, seems not quite of the world she inhabits. If Passage wants to be a movie, Body Remembers wants to be a series of paintings. Moffatt’s own life and family history is in there too, under the horizon, but present just the same.