International cinema is generally an accessible medium despite national and cultural barriers. It’s able to transcend these obstacles—including language—by virtue of commonly understood human stories and predicaments, and, of course, the use of subtitles and dubbing.

Aesthetically, Mohammad Rasoulof’s Iron Island is an involving, occasionally compelling film. But it’s oblique allusive style and the cultural assumptions that underlie its storyline may well lock American audiences out of an understanding of it.

The title refers to a rusting hulk of an oil tanker sitting in water off the southern Iranian shore. The ship is home to scores of Sunni Arab refugees (their ethnicity is only implicit) who have been organized into a crude social order by a domineering but energetically resourceful man known as Captain Nemat (Ali Nassirian).

This ad hoc community’s situation is becoming even more straightened: the ship is beginning to sink and its owner wanted to evict the refugees and scrap it. Meanwhile the “captain” is pursuing an elaborate solution.

Summarized thusly, the film sounds coherent and comprehensible, but much of this information has to be summarized and some of the most crucial matters are never clearly addressed. Even more challenging, the characters and their various efforts become more opaquely symbolic, and the film turns to allegorical, inaccessible themes, culminating in its last, mysteriously metaphorical sequence.

Iron Island has forceful, apparently complex performances—especially Nassirian’s—but placing them into a context is difficult. Reza Jalali’s cinematography is luminously dramatic, but it and the film’s other formal qualities can only go so far toward allowing us into an appreciation of Iron Island’s significance. It plays on Wednesday and Thursday on the Emerging Cinema screen at the Market Arcade Film and Arts Center.