With “Sister Aimee,” the writers and directors Samantha Buck and Marie Schlingmann turn a bizarre, real-life event from the 1920s — the sudden disappearance of the celebrity evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson — into a mischievous feminist fable.

Confessing upfront about their gleeful fictions, the filmmakers reimagine a roughly five-week period in 1926 when McPherson (wholeheartedly played by Anna Margaret Hollyman ) disappeared from a beach and was presumed dead.

“She evaporated!,” her baffled assistant, who was with her at the time, tells the police. When you’re almost as popular as the Pope, an investigation is certain, and the movie is dotted with dryly revealing interrogations of Aimee’s family and associates. Meantime our restless heroine, her revival crowds dwindling and her evangelical brio fading, has taken a new name and is driving to Mexico with her latest lover (Michael Mosley) and a no-nonsense female guide named Rey (a marvelous Andrea Suárez Paz).