Directed by Godfrey Reggio. Rated G.

In trendsetting documentaries like Koyaanisqatsi and its globetrotting sequels, Godfrey Reggio sometimes utilized such fragmented storytelling, complete with slash-and-burn editing and time-lapse photography, that the films—for all their technology-loathing humanism—could resemble Max Headroom’s epilepsy-inducing blipverts.

In Visitors, he trades in colour for deep-toned black-and-white and slows things down to Marina Abramović speeds. Like the art-world doyenne, Reggio makes us confront our fellow earthlings with little context from which to draw conclusions. One face he regularly returns to is that of a soulful-eyed gorilla borrowed from the Bronx Zoo, who stares back with enough tender ferocity to remind us of our primordial roots and, presumably, of our limited time on this planet.

The near-90-minute film offers portraits of people of all ages, usually slowed down enough to study infinitesimal changes in expression. (In this reality, an eye-blink becomes a major narrative development.) Philip Glass’s music, so insistent in the earlier films, has likewise decelerated, with small changes in harmony and instrumentation providing the minimalist drama. Many people are studied alone or in small groups, usually against black backgrounds, but they also clump up in some public spaces, whether walking on busy streets or reacting explosively to some event (sporting match? horror movie?) in an undarkened cinema.

Occasionally, the “action” moves to natural environments—principally, a mysteriously placid Louisiana bayou and, even more baffling from a narrative point of view, a sky full of slo-mo seagulls. There are occasional visits to some brutalist architecture (the Latin words for New Order Security are written, in blocky art-deco script, on its façade) and, even more pointedly, to an abandoned amusement park with a giant GAMES looming admonishingly over the industrial wreckage.

A statement is being made here about how we are amusing ourselves to death, or something like that. The movie does not yield easily to interpretation. Or, rather, it yields to so many kinds of analysis that some viewers will extract deep meaning while others will drift away. In any event, as an exercise in prolonged visual meditation, Visitors definitely finds its own place in the world.