A driven and heartless tabloid photographer finally grasps why some cultures believe a photograph steals part of your soul in “Disappear Completely,” a cerebral and seriously stylish thriller from Mexico.

It’s a tale of supernatural comeuppance for a do-anything-for-the-shot mercenary who takes one scandal/tragedy/crime-scene photo too many.

Santiago (Harold Torres) is the first guy the cops he bribes calls when there’s a gory traffic crash, a murder with the corpse still warm or a scandal involving a public figure.

Their rule, thanks to the palms Santiago keeps greasing, is call Santiago, and once he’s on site THEN “call it in.”

He’s the guy who ducks under the crime scene tape, or climbs in through a window. Because even when he’s late getting there, he’s not leaving without a shot, the gorier the better.

His glib labels for the photos often make it into the headlines on the cover story his photos generate. An aged senator finds himself eaten alive by rats? Senator “Cheese Man” (in Spanish, with English subtitles) it is.

Nurse Marcela (Teté Espinoza), his live-in love of 14 years, can’t break his mania for staying on call, even on a supposed date night. Even their dog Zombie takes a back seat to Santiago’s hours sitting overnight in his VW Golf, listening to the scanner or waiting for cops Lupe or Catoche (Vicky Araico, Fermin Martinez) to call.

Sometimes, he’s beaten-up for doing his job. As long as he’s got the negatives — he shoots on film and digitally — that’s no great bother.

But that senator? That’s a body, a story and a scene that haunts Santiago. His first hallucination about it happens while he’s shooting it. That’s his first clue that it’s all about to come apart for him.

Director and co-writer Luis Javier Henaine (“Ready to Mingle” was his) puts a lot of craft and ambition on the screen with this story, which immerses us in Santiago’s twisted soul. He spies on Marcela at work comforting a teen suicide survivor, and photographs them. Then Henaine shows Santiago grappling with the consequences for what he’s done, that one photograph that he never should have taken — one of many he shouldn’t have taken.

When the police can’t help and the medical profession has no answers, Santiago takes advice from a superstitious policeman. And that’s when things turn seriously weird.

Henaine treats this entire tale as an odyssey, following Santiago through the looking-lens and into the dark corners of his psyche and the worst things he imagines might happen to him, some of which really do happen to him.

Torres (“Silent Night” and “Memory” were two Hollywood credits) makes Santiago compelling without being sympathetic, an ambitious man consumed by his art and his competitive drive, a guy who doesn’t want children but who doesn’t screw around when his livelihood — to say nothing of his physical well being — is threatened.

One clever conceit — an assault, by bug or “beast,” on his hearing is accompanied by an increasingly distorted and eventually even silent soundtrack.

The film, titled “Desaparecer Por Completo” in Mexico, mimics its director/co-writer’s ambition as Santiago dreams of his lurid night shots of the dead being shown in a gallery. Henaine has made a self-consciously artsy thriller, a Mexican “Night Crawler” with the supernaturalism and search for a “cure” a nasty new wrinkle in this study of the media creatures of the night.

Is “Disappear Completely” art? Sure. Kind of. Close enough.

And if its jolts are few, the chilling tone sells it as one of the smarter horror tales to come along of late, north or south of the border.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, horrific images, sex

Cast: Harold Torres, Teté Espinoza, José Manuel Poncelis, Vicky Araico, Fermin Martinez and Norma Reyna

Credits: Directed by Luis Javier Henaine, scripted by Ricardo Aguado-Fentanes and Luis Javier Henaine. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:43