Mesmerizing from its crypto-poetic opening to its drop the mike finale, “Candela” is a thriller as exotic and mysterious as its locale, a brisk and atmospheric tale bathed in drugs, sex and corruption.

First-time feature director Andrés Farías and his award-winning film’s co-writer, adapting a novel by Rey Andújar, give us a daring and dark fever dream of the Dominican Republic, a film that is as quintessentially Caribbean as any in recent memory.

A drag performer — Candela (Cesar Domíngue) — in native garb, bathed in black, intones that there’s a hurricane coming, but not to worry, that it will “fall in love with us,” and only kill a few thousand. Such is the fatalism of the poor islands off the Fodors Guidebook to the Caribbean.

An inutterably gorgeous woman — Sera (Sarah Jorge León) — in impossibly high heels and an erotically short skirt begins and ends her days with “a bump” of cocaine, her very essence reminding us that around the world, there’s no substitute for being young and beautiful and incredibly rich. She quietly bridles at the corporate “merger” facing her senator-father’s company and another, one that entails her marrying the boor-heir to the other firm. She acts-out through bar pick-ups and furtive infidelities in the alley behind The Remora, the toniest night club in the Caribbean.

Sera’s most reckless act that night sets our plot in motion and her in collision with working poor Lubrini, the gay drag performer Candela who utters poetic pronouncements from the stage between lip-synced Latin pop.

Because who does Sera stalk, kidnap at gunpoint and demand sex from? That would be the college-educated poet, Renate Castrate (Richarson Díaz), Candela’s lover. When Renate doesn’t come home, Lubrini gets a lady friend to summon her estranged father, the cynical loner Lt. Perez (Félix Germán of “The Projectionist”).

And even though his captain assures him that this body below the open window of the rich brat’s penthouse will be a matter “Everyone’s going to drop…like nothing happened (in Dominican Spanish with subtitles),” even though the dazed coronor (Pepe Sierra) would rather watch Internet porn on the clock than do a job the “higher ups” want dropped, Perez is determined to stay in his daughter’s good graces by pursuing something like “justice” here. More or less. And up to a point.

“It’s too soon to be tired,” he tells the losing-faith Lubrini. “That’s how things are in this country.”

The story, divided into narrative “chapters” like the book, takes some effort to grab hold of early on. Farías and co-adaptor Laura Conyendo cast us into mystery and slowly lead us out into something more conventional than it looks at first glance.

The exotic drag act and glimpses of extreme wealth, isolation and privilege in a poor country misdirect us from the only-in-the-movies nature of the crime and death, the inevitable attempt at a cover-up, the insertion of “drugs” and a Jabba-the-Hutt sized drug dealer — all elements of a much more ordinary thriller.

But “Candela” isn’t ordinary. It’s smart and strange and damning and frustrating, immersive in the ways it layers in Perez’s only friend, a hooker (Ruth Emeterio) who sees him as her lifeline as he should see her as his, in the details about the coronor, the rich bride-to-be’s bodyguard.

That hurricane we hear is coming is just another spiritual cleansing, another punishment for a place set up to serve the needs ot the very rich and which keeps everybody else blaming Haitian immigrants for their troubles.

What Farías and Conyendo conjure out of Andújar’s novel is a poetic allegory wrapped around an ordinary murder mystery thriller, and one of the best films ever to come out of the Dominican Republic.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, sex, nudity

Cast: Cesar Domínguez, Sarah Jorge León, Félix Germán, Ruth Emeterio, Pepe Sierra and Richarson Díaz

Credits: Andrés Farías, scripted by Laura Conyendo and Andrés Farías, based on a novel by
Rey Andújar. A Breaking Glass release.

Running time: 1:29