Literary devices and constructions don’t always translate easily to the screen. And the current screenwriter obsession with making many a script play out in “chapters,” denoted in pointlessly distracting onscreen graphics, is one of the clunkiest.

Even when you’re adapting a novel, that novelistic organizational tool tends to get in the way of the narrative, an unnecessary indulgence for audiences used to changing points of view in telling and retelling a story, going all the way back to “Rashomon.”

Five chapter headings labeling differing views and clues about a murder in the Mexican boondocks mute the impact of “Hurricane Season,” an immersive but arms-length Mexican thriller based on a novel by Fernanda Melchor. It’s a slow-unfolding mystery that strains to hide its solution by relying on first a seemingly unreliable narrator, then by adding agendas, motives and suspects to our theory of “whodunit” in a series of profiles built on this or that person’s involvement in the killing.

On the cusp of “Temporada de huracanes” (hurricane season), tweenage boys find the body in a fetid, discolored river, a snake crawling out of its mouth. The whispers tell us that it was “la bruja,” a witch who lived on the edge of town, whom nobody called by name but who threw parties, had clients and connections and friends even.

But when “friends” show up to collect her body from the cop, they won’t surrender it.

Yesenia (Paloma Almvamar) comes in to the police station to give her statement and a theory. She figures her resented cousin Luismi (Andrés Cordova) was involved. The way she throws around how this teen is “grandma’s favorite” (in Spanish, or dubbed), the way she attaches the same gay slur to him that others have laid at the foot of the dead witch — “maricón” (a homophobic slur) — suggests maybe she has ulterior motives.

“Hurricane Season” then begins to unravel what really went down that caused a transgender “witch” (Edgar Treviño) to wind up in a muddy river in the least enlightened corner of Mexico.

The different points of view of the events that led to this murder fold in prejudices, superstitions, abortion and gossip about money, any one of which or combination could have been the witch’s undoing.

When they want to party with no inhibitions, they come to her house. When a teen needs an abortion in Catholic Mexico, there’s a knock on her door. When pretty boy Luismi and others need quick cash, she’s willing to help.

Homophobic name-calling is all well and good, but beware of the dude quickest to bark “maricón,” because we’ve all learned the psychological definition of “projection” over the past seven years.

Any and all of those things contribute to her murder.

“Don’t Blame Karma” director Elisa Miller has some trouble giving the viewer someone to root for or some goal one hopes the story achieves as virtually nobody in this is noble enough or human enough to be worthy of our sympathy and loyalty.

The witch? We’d root for her, but we know she’s dead. We never learn her name. And the script doesn’t let us catch more than a few glimpses of her personality and compassion.

The character I connected with most was the teen girl Norma (Kat Rigoni), fleeing to this town for reasons we can guess, only to be hounded by predatory creeps the minute she gets off the bus.

She has problems and Luismi, living down to his cousin’s appraisal of his character, is a little too eager to take her in. It’s his hooker-mother (Reyna Medizaba) who gives the fourteen year-old the straight dope.

In this town, in this country, in this life, “If you lose your nerve, they’ll crush you.”

The screenplay teases at a sort of insurance company settlement of sorts, this person bearing that much responsibility, that one tying in another way with a greater or lesser share of the blame.

But the structure of the story and the storytelling style muddy our easy grasp of where this is going and what it’s saying when it gets there.

It’s not enough to merely introduce gay characters, gay themes and the pressures exerted by a sexist, macho, patriarchal society. You’ve got to wring a moving story out of their plight. “Hurricane Season” doesn’t.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, profanity, slurs

Cast: Paloma Alvamar, Andrés Cordova, Gustavo “Guss” Morales, Kat Rigoni, Ernesto Meléndez and Edgar Treviño.

Credits: Directed by Elisa Miller, scripted by Daniela Gómez and Elisa Miller, based on the novel by Fernanda Melchor. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39