In Bangladesh, the sport of boli khela — or the wrestler game — is a meticulous, methodical affair, a tone Iqbal H. Chowdhury re-creates for his debut feature, “The Wrestler.” Straddling a line between observational and oblique, the film seems designed to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure, gesturing toward masculine boundaries in a rural, often overcast coastal setting without fully articulating them.

In leaving much of his story up to intuition — and taking a climactic turn toward the surreal — Chowdhury crafts a scrupulous slow-burn drama about a kind of obsession that, despite being opaque, comes off as entirely tragic. Its central focus is the elderly wrestler/wrestling trainer Moju (Nasir Uddin Khan), an aging fisherman whose frustrations with his lack of recent catch lead him to challenge local champion Dofor (Akm Itmam). Then again, this economic woe is just one of several possibilities pushing Moju toward certain self-destruction (it’s the...