Starring Callum Keith Rennie, Tantoo Cardinal, and Carmen Moore. Rated 18A. Opens Friday, December 1, at the Granville 7

It’s easy enough to drive through the Downtown Eastside and avert your eyes. But in unflinching detail, Unnatural & Accidental yanks you into the alleyways and behind the seedy-hotel doors to show you things most people would probably rather pretend don’t happen.

Canadian director Carl Bessai has taken Marie Clements’s surrealist play, The Unnatural and Accidental Women, and torqued it up for the big screen. Based loosely on the true-life case of Gilbert Paul Jordan, the story depicts a serial killer who preys on Native women on Vancouver’s skid row, force-feeding them booze, sexually assaulting them, and leaving them to die naked of alcohol poisoning or other complications. The film version follows young professional Rebecca (Vancouver’s Carmen Moore), whose father’s dying wish is that she find her aboriginal mother, a woman missing on the streets for 20 years. The spirits of dead victims protect and guide Rebecca on her journey into the grimy labyrinth of the Downtown Eastside, bringing her ever closer to the maniacal predator Norman (Callum Keith Rennie).

Clement’s play was a sprawling, poetic meditation on the murders of Native women and the way they’re dismissed by society (the title comes from police reports). Bessai, working with Clements as screenwriter, has maintained her hallucinatory, magic ­-realist feel, using stylized camera work to evoke drunkenness and disorientation and seamlessly integrating some haunting imagery of ghost figures: there is one scene of a dead body coming to “life” in a morgue refrigerator that is truly eerie. He’s also shot the Hastings and Main ’hood on location in all its grit.

But Bessai and Clements have cut back on the stories of the many female characters to concentrate more on the central leads, and Bessai has spun the second half of the film into a thriller that verges on a horror movie. Moore is compelling as Rebecca, and Tantoo Cardinal is quietly mesmerizing as the spirit who guides the souls of the other women. But Rennie’s blue-collar alcoholic is a monster. It’s a risky role for the actor to take on—an irredeemable racist, rapist, and misogynist. His portrayal, shown in disturbing detail, takes the movie into a different realm than the play: that of violent revenge fantasy, of good versus pure evil.

It does make for riveting, often distressing viewing, but Unnatural & Accidental’s serial-killer plot threatens to overshadow the main strength of Clements’s play—humanizing the victims.

The Downtown Eastside attracts the kind of creeps who prey on the down-and-out, mostly because society allows them to. For years there were official denials surrounding the missing women now linked to the Robert Pickton case, followed by the all-too-slow realization that Native girls and women have been disappearing from the so-called Highway of Tears. Yes, it’s time for it to end, and Bessai brings some art to this ongoing brutality. But whether audiences will want to sit through the horror—without averting their eyes—is the question.