It’s that rare thing, the intellectually haunting film — the movie that doesn’t shock with its gore or stun with its violence so much as work its way beneath your senses to terrify with a realization about our species and ourselves that we’d rather not admit is true.

Few films have crossed that memorable threshold. One’s mind turns to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” with its ideas about man’s origins, and our insignificance; or to Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre, The Wrath of God,” about the self-destructive nature of ambition and the co-opting of religion; or even to Woody Allen’s “Manhattan,” an unflattering confrontation of the selfish, blind, and fleeting nature of love.

There’s something to be said for a movie that helps us see ourselves in a new and darker light. And that is the greatest praise one can offer Nicolas Roeg’s “Walkabout,” one of cinema’s most haunting and disorienting visions, a deceptively beautiful masterpiece that has been missing from the cinematic landscape of theater, video, and DVD for far too long.

With a formula that could so easily have become a routine thriller, melodrama, or commentary on class or race, “Walkabout” instead rises above its surface actions to regard not just three characters stranded in the Australian outback, but larger notions of human progress and civilization. The theme of the film is never spelled out, only vaguely implied, but it seems to float on the wind as it whips across these vast, arid landscapes — a condescension which might sound something like: “What a nice, irrelevant society you have pulled over your eyes.”

The film opens with a title card, explaining that a “walkabout” is an aboriginal tradition which requires all teenagers to walk the land on their own and learn to survive, and then goes on to contrast the awesome splendor of Australia’s most remote regions with the hustle and bustle of a modern city. Amid the concrete and steel, we see children in schools, towering office buildings, and immense, sophisticated apartment complexes. Mr. Roeg cuts to brick and then to the rock of a cliff, before the camera slides away and we find ourselves as far away from “civilization” as possible.

An irrational act strands two upper-class children — a young boy wearing a suit and a teenage girl wearing a short skirt — in the middle of nowhere, without supplies or shelter. They wander and they wait, at first seeing this dangerous situation as a game — boy running in the sand and girl taking in the sites — before realizing they are parched and starving under the midday sun.

Days later they come upon a small oasis, a tree bearing fruit and a pond of water. They gorge and lie in the shade, both preferring to sleep and relax rather than devise a way to sustain themselves. They sleep unaware of the animals sniffing at them as they slumber or the pythons slithering in the tree above their canopy. But they awake one morning to discover that the tree is bare and the water is gone, and they begin to die once again — until a teenage aborigine boy emerges from the horizon, hunting an animal and later teaching these strangers how to extract water from beneath the muddy floor of the former pond.

Together, the three start to wander. The girl asks the aborigine questions to no avail, and the young boy regales his new friend with stories. But his words aren’t being understood, the aborigine talks in a tongue these prim and proper children cannot decipher.

Some have called Mr. Roeg’s film a story about communication, or the lack thereof, and the way these three characters are irreversibly separated by their distinct cultures and languages. But there is something greater at work that points to communication not as the cause of the story, but merely a symbol of a larger point.

True, they can’t talk, but even without the benefit of two-way communication, they begin to bond. Together, they embrace the earth, discovering lush hideaways and hunting for food; the two white children abandon their radio — their last connection to society — in favor of the rhythms and silences of nature.

While Mr. Roeg’s lush, panormaic photography (“Walkabout” makes the short list of the most beautiful films of all time) accentuates the differences between these characters early on — often obscuring the bodies of the young white children as the landscape looms before them — it starts to integrate them systematically in later scenes. A sunset renders both boys black, while later on a bright light casts the aborigine white as he looks into the face of the young girl, offering sweet words she can’t understand. In two unforgettable moments, the image half-merges from children to landscape, making the earth and their bodies indistinguishable from one another.

Even the soundtrack exaggerates their isolation from society, juxtaposing a cacophony of radio signals with a calm, orchestral score that can only be heard out here, in the open.

What ultimately sets “Walkabout” apart, however, is the way Mr. Roeg jarringly cuts from this naturalistic tale of self-discovery back to images of conventional society. As the aborigine slaughters an animal, we’re returned to the day-to-day trimming of a butcher’s shop. As the movie opens, Mr. Roeg immediately disassociates society from nature with the image of a man standing on his apartment balcony, watching two people below swim in a pool dug out only feet from the ocean. In one unforgettable sequence, Mr. Roeg cuts between a group of scientific researchers — a group of men fawning and backstabbing each other as they ogle their female colleague — with the three lost children, all naked without shame or obsession.

The film’s closing montage contrasts the affections of the aborigine and the girl’s rebuffing of him with the image of a supposedly happy modern marriage back in the city — woman in the kitchen, man arriving home for work, conversation about job and money.

After 90 minutes, far removed from cubicles or pay stubs, Mr. Roeg succeeds in breaking down our notions of superiority. He cuts across such ideas as geography and technology to show us that the world moves forward as it will, from the paved cities of business suits to the barren land of the aborigines, and the smoldering rocks on which desert lizards crawl by unnoticed. True, we’ve developed our own way of coping and surviving, just as they have, but we’ve also lost something in perfecting our isolation. Maybe what we all crave — what we all need — is a good walkabout.

Through December 28 (209 W. Houston Street, between Sixth Avenue and Varick St., 212-727-8110).