To call your movie “Genèse” (“Genesis”), as the rising French Canadian director Philippe Lesage has, takes a healthy ego. So does abruptly abandoning your main narrative line nearly two hours in, sans explanation, to revisit a character from another movie you made that few people saw. (It’s called “Les Démons,” and Film at Lincoln Center is helpfully showing it alongside “Genèse” through Aug. 29.)

But “Genèse” is unusual enough that those gambits seem bold rather than foolhardy. The film may be maddening as a character study, and it could damage an ionizer with its air of self-importance, but its experiments in form and tone are highly original.