Twisting the serial-killer story into an unexpectedly novel shape, Adam Wingard’s film “A Horrible Way to Die” is a restrained, ripely atmospheric thriller that relies more on mood than on special effects.

Structured around parallel narratives that gradually converge, Simon Barrett’s cunning plot introduces Sarah (Amy Seimetz), a withdrawn dental hygienist battling alcoholism and nasty memories. While Sarah moves haltingly toward a relationship with a clean-cut A.A. buddy (Joe Swanberg), an escaped murderer named Garrick (A J Bowen) is moving toward her. As we already know from the film’s opening scene, Garrick is far from rehabilitated.

Playing with chronology and the audience’s expectations, Mr. Wingard has assembled a risky genre piece heavy on flashbacks and light on gore. Victims and their wounds are glimpsed in queasy flares of violence, blips of trauma in an otherwise muted landscape of lonely country roads and depressingly minimalist interiors. Nudging the image in and out of focus, the director turns the camera into an inebriated eye, shifting our attention from foreground to background with blurry regularity.

Under punishingly close scrutiny, the actors bear up remarkably well, with Ms. Seimetz uncomfortably credible as a woman whose precarious sobriety is about to become the least of her problems. Viewed simply as a horror movie, “A Horrible Way to Die” is diverting; viewed as commentary on our willingness to tune out evil for the sake of emotional connection, it’s devastating.