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With “Winter Sleep,” Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan signaled a shift in style, increasing the importance of extended dialogues to the visually rich chamber pieces he plays out on grand stages. “The Wild Pear Tree” goes a step further, building elaborate rhetorical set pieces of such density that digesting them in all their intricacies at one sitting is practically impossible. Even more than in his previous film, Ceylan and his fellow scriptwriters develop astonishingly complex spoken recitatives that weave philosophy, religious tradition, and ethics together into a mesmerizing verbal fugue. For his fans, the three hours won’t feel like an indulgence, but those less sympathetic to the shared primacy of verbiage and imagery will likely feel tested. The achievement is masterful, though its diffusion will be limited.

Thematically “The Wild Pear Tree” fits perfectly into the director’s melancholy expanse of male disaffection, though his main character is younger than many of his protagonists,...