At first, of course, we must take that sensitivity on faith. K does his grim job thoroughly and without complaint, showing the weary, cynical patience of an old-time shamus. His commander (Robin Wright) is a human who believes that everything depends on policing the border between her kind and K’s. The whole point of “Blade Runner,” though, is that such boundaries are always blurred and porous. K comes home each night from work to the company of Joi (Ana de Armas), his devoted girlfriend, who happens to be a commercially produced artificial intelligence application.

We are prepared to acknowledge the pathos and the paradox of her condition, which is a version of K’s own. The idea that synthetic humans harbor feelings, desires and dreams — that they are mirrors of us, that we are replicas of them — has long been a staple of speculative cinema. “Blade Runner 2049” does not wander as deep into this ontological thicket as, say, Steven Spielberg’s “A.I.” or Spike Jonze’s “Her,” but like those movies it uses the conceit of the suffering cyborg as ethical and emotional ballast, a spur to the audience’s curiosity as well as our compassion. A political theme also asserts itself: These replicants are an enslaved labor force; their exploitation is the fuel on which this civilization runs.

There is a something to think about here, a fair amount to feel and even more to see. Mr. Villeneuve has conspired with the cinematographer, Roger A. Deakins; the production designer, Dennis Gassner; and the special effects team to create zones of strangeness that occasionally rise to the level of sublimity. The movies Mr. Villeneuve has directed — his recent English-language features include “Sicario,” “Prisoners” and “Arrival” — are full of violence and psychological intensity, but what distinguishes them from other high-end genre spectacles is an unnerving calm, as if he were exploring and trying to synthesize the human and mechanical sides of his own sensibility.