Amy Ryan, Leslie Bibb, Danny McBride, and Sam Rockwell in a scene from Jared Hess’s film “Don Verdean.” Photograph from Lions Gate / Everett

There are few films released this year that I anticipated more eagerly than “Don Verdean,” the fourth feature directed by Jared Hess. The bare-bones premise alone—about the excavations of a so-called Biblical archeologist—had me hooked in advance, because the movie seems like the logical extension of Hess’s career to date. Working mainly with Jerusha Hess, his wife and co-writer of the scripts, he has conjured some of the most exotic religious visions in the modern cinema. (Terrence Malick comes close but also does so much more, and a little less.)

The suppressed religious context of the Hesses’ first feature, “Napoleon Dynamite,” was obvious to me when I saw it in first run. I wondered why its milieu of high-school students was so devoid of pop-culture effluvia, and I figured that it was steeped in another sort of culture, one that determined the characters’ ethos but was filtered out for the screen. Turns out I was right, as seen in Hess’s bumptious follow-up, “Nacho Libre,” and, even more, in “Gentlemen Broncos,” which raises the fusion of religion and pop culture to ecstatic and loopy new heights.

“Don Verdean” delivers on the promise of its premise: it’s a purer, stranger, and more dangerous religious vision than the three films that preceded it—yet the very purity of that world view is its subject, while its dangers go unexamined. The title character (played by Sam Rockwell) is a freelance archeologist whose life’s mission is the search for artifacts that demonstrate the historical accuracy of the Bible. The movie begins with a faux-archival video from a decade ago that extols Don’s discovery of the shears that clipped Samson and salutes his resulting worldwide renown.

The action proper starts in the present day, with Don’s popularity dwindling; his audiences are sparse, his book sales are scant, and—though he continues to express the hope of spreading the faith and helping to save the souls of those who hear his message—he can’t separate his activities from the quest for adulation and the pride of success. That’s when he accepts the invitation to join forces with a glad-handing celebrity preacher, Tony Lazarus (Danny McBride), a fiercely orotund evolution-denier who will finance Don’s trips in order to display the unearthed treasures in his church.

Soon, Don digs himself into a hole. His Israeli Jewish handler and fixer Boaz Yohalem (Jemaine Clement) has the inside track on a major discovery—the pillar of salt into which Lot’s wife was transformed on the flight from Sodom and Gomorrah—and, receiving Tony’s cash, ships the massive artifact to Don. When it arrives, something seems comically amiss, but Don and Tony suppress their misgivings and present it to members of the congregation, who in turn override their doubts and accept it as holy. This dubious revelation also prompts the suspicion of Tony’s rival preacher, Dennis Fontaine (Will Forte), an ex-satanist in league with the grimly nerdy Dr. Stanley (Sky Elobar), who scheme to debunk the Verdean findings and dethrone the Lazarus ministry.

But Don’s newfound fame ups the ante on his work, and, in need of ever-greater discoveries, he yields to temptation and, on an unsuccessful trip to Israel, fabricates artifacts. There, sniffing out the plot, Boaz blackmails Don into making him a full partner in the enterprise and taking him back to the United States so that he can “live the American dream”—which, he says, involves a Pontiac, acid-washed Levis, and a wife who is “gentle and sweet and hot like stripper.” (Clement plays Boaz with an unctuously exaggerated accent.)

Then, Stateside, the partnership veers from minor to major fraud, as Boaz masterminds an ever-more-intricate, violent, reckless criminal scheme, even as he seeks all the more cravenly to slake his lust and flaunt his depravity, all while wearing a yarmulke and touting his Judaism. Under the influence of Boaz, Don yields to still greater forms of temptation, but Boaz himself unapologetically carries the unscrupulous ploy to shocking and brazen extremes. I won’t spoil the ending except to say that Don finds Christian redemption while Boaz remains unscrupulous and unrepentant—and even revels in the connivance of another Jewish partner in crime.

It’s impossible to watch Hess’s films without eyes wide open, and “Don Verdean” is no different. There’s an essence of astonishment, of spontaneous and innocent wonder at work in Hess’s films; it comes through in his discerning, concentrated, frontally direct images as well as in his characters’ fervent peculiarity and innocent obstinacy. In his earlier films, he comically dramatizes a puckishly exuberant religion, in which sweet but giddy joys mesh with steadfast faith, humiliation and self-abasement with ecstatic devotion. But in “Don Verdean,” Hess’s sense of wonder is laced with fury, and it arouses a viewer’s bewilderment, even incredulity, that the director dares to depict the action—in particular, the actions of Boaz—with such unvarnished revulsion. Hess’s previous films had heroes whose quests led them to a measure of joyful redemption on Earth. In “Don Verdean,” however, the protagonist’s heroism brings out the tragic element of Christianity.

In “Don Verdean,” the joy of faith is gone. Religion has become a stern ideal that blasts away the illusions of earthly pursuits and allows only a submissive and humble struggle for redemption after a personal fall that’s either a melodramatic or a ridiculous imitation of the Fall. That’s why the earthly institutions of Christianity that Hess depicts from the start of the film are the relentless objects of scathing yet empathetic satire. Don Verdean’s original archeological passion may be motivated by faith, but it’s a faith perverted both by a wrong-headed quest for earthly success and by a fundamental betrayal of faith itself—by asserting that faith is in need of rational proof by means of science and scholarship.

The main target of Hess’s satire isn’t Jews, or even Boaz himself—it’s the commercialization and instrumentalization of Christian faith. From the start of the movie, Don is enjoying his celebrity a little too much, arguing on behalf of his mission a little too pharisaically, leading congregants down the false path of rational proof of a faith that, however, should both resist and surpass reason. For all his enthusiastic and energetic promotion of Christian belief, Don himself is a man of insufficient faith, and so are the ministers and congregants who welcome him and his discoveries with open arms.

The film is a fiercely satirical Kierkegaardian purge of the worldly institutions of Christianity, in favor of a true, pure, humble, and personally demanding faith. Here, Hess dispenses comedy with a barely suppressed flow of bile—albeit one that yields one of the funniest scenes of the year, in which Tony’s wife Joylinda (Leslie Bibb), pointedly described as a former “hooker,” sings in church about Lot’s wife. Her mock-sincere song, “Pillar of Salt,” features such delirious rhymes as:

“It’s all her fault, She should have listened when her husband shouted ‘Halt.’ ”

She, Don, his assistant Carol (Amy Ryan), Tony, and even the ex-satanist minister Fontaine are, however, satirized with an undertone of sympathy connected to their place in the gravitational field of Christian faith. Boaz, by contrast, is the object of devastating and hostile satire.