At least in that regard, Victor, who speaks in Mr. Sullivan’s voice, is something of an alter ego for the filmmaker, a skilled illustrator and cultural omnivore who decorates his imaginary provincial landscape with odd little jokes and allusions. One that caught my eye was an advertisement for Falconetti’s Barbecue, a grisly bit of cinephile humor referring to Maria Falconetti, who played Joan of Arc in Carl Dreyer’s 1928 silent film. But nearly every frame in “Consuming Spirits” — and there are more than 230,000 of them — seems to contain a similar morsel of oblique or buried wit.

This density of detail contributes to the film’s unsettling emotional intensity. The fates of Gentian, Earl and Victor converge in a car accident that gravely injures a nun and that seems at first to fall into the “random, senseless” category. But nothing in Mr. Sullivan’s universe is random, and subsequent chapters reveal a tangle of dark meanings under the surface.

These are best left for the viewer to discover, since part of the pleasure of “Consuming Spirits” lies in marveling at the intricacies of its design. We travel from the colorful, cluttered daily reality of the characters into realms of memory and fantasy, most of them rendered in spare and beautiful black-and-white line drawings. The past encroaches on the present, and the consequences of half-forgotten transgressions play out in surprising but nonetheless curiously logical ways.

Mysteries proliferate. Whose bones are those in the woods, shrouded in the skin of a deer? Who is locked up in the convent that conveniently and ghoulishly doubles as an insane asylum? And how do actions arising from family love or neighborly charity cause so much damage and grief?