The story that begins in this grandly conceived horror-fantasy import — a box-office sensation upon its release in Russia two years ago — is far more interesting than, say, the one that spluttered forth over the course of the second and third "Matrix" movies. Not to mention the "Underworld" films.

"Night Watch" opens with a scene set a thousand years ago, in which two contingents of armored soldiers confront each other on a bridge. These are the Warriors of Darkness and the Protectors of Light, who together make up the supernatural legion of Others — witches, vampires and shape-shifters of various sorts who have always walked undetected among humankind. A battle erupts that becomes so bloody a truce has to be called. The warring factions agree that thenceforth the forces of Light will form a Night Watch to monitor and restrain the evil activities of the Warriors of Darkness; the Dark forces, in turn, will form a Day Watch to keep an eye on the good guys. That good guys should bear watching too is an indication of the story's unusual moral complexity, which will become clearer as the picture proceeds.

We next flash forward to 1992, and see a young man named Anton (the scruffily engaging Konstantin Khabensky) paying a visit to the Moscow apartment of an old woman who is in fact a witch allied with the Dark forces. Anton is upset that his girlfriend has left him for another man. The woman tells him that not only has the girl left him, but that she is pregnant. She tells him that she can punish the girl for her infidelity by killing the child in her womb, but only if Anton assumes full responsibility for the deed. He unwisely agrees. Before this long-distance abortion can be completely carried out, however, a Night Watch squad bursts into the apartment and seizes the witch. In the process, they discover that Anton himself is also an Other.

Twelve years later, Anton, togged out in flappy overcoat, fingerless wool gloves and sunglasses after dark, has become an officer with the Night Watch. The truce between the forces of Light, led by a bluff, burly man named Geser (Vladimir Menshov, who directed the Oscar-winning 1979 Russian film "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears"), and the forces of Darkness, led by the elegantly creepy Zavulon (Victor Verzhbitsky), is growing shaky. An ancient prophecy foretells the coming of a Great One, who will bring the struggle between Light and Dark to an apocalyptic end. What the prophecy doesn't foretell is which side the Great One will take. There's an uneasy suspicion, however, that he'll be showing up to take it very soon.

Anton next becomes involved with a young boy who is hearing "The Call" of the Other world, and whom Anton must intercept before the child falls into Dark hands. There is also a young woman named Svetlana (Maria Poroshina), who lives under a dreadful curse, unwittingly destroying all living things to which she turns her attention. The outward manifestation of her oppressive burden is a funneling Vortex of evil that swirls above her, and is growing higher and more threatening with each passing day.

Working with a budget of only $4-million, director Timur Bekmambetov, who started out making Russian TV commercials and music videos, has created a lightly stylized world out of the drab materials of post-Soviet Moscow — its minimally populated streets, its glaring subways and its cramped, tatty apartments. Clearly inspired by big-budget Hollywood movies like "The Matrix," Bekmambetov was just as clearly determined not to simply rip those films off. Instead, he has put together a movie that is matter-of-factly Russian in its look and feel, and impressively inventive. For example, being unable to outsource the movie's many special-effects shots to a Western company that might have handled them with ease, he instead created a virtual, computer-linked network of small FX shops throughout Russia to do the job, working around the clock, in relays, across the country's many time zones.

Much of what this team has achieved is remarkable, especially the scene in which a truck bears down on an old man in the middle of a street, and with a raised hand he sends it somersaulting high above his head to land with a crunch farther down the road. There's a bravura sequence in which a bolt tears loose from the body of an airplane and we follow it all the way down to earth, where it bounces into a heating duct filled with cockroaches, and finally plops out into a kitchen to land in a woman's coffee cup. The riotous swarm of wheeling black birds that fill the Vortex as it centers ominously on top of an apartment building is also memorable, as is the shot in which a Dark character reaches behind his neck and yanks his entire spine out of his body.

No one involved in making this movie lacked talent; it's only their resources that were circumscribed. Nevertheless, the resulting film isn't quite what even a sympathetic Western viewer might hope it would be. Anyone who remembers what it was like to see "The Matrix" for the first time seven years ago is likely to find that "Night Watch" lacks lift-off — it's not especially scary and its storyline isn't always entirely clear. The movie's cultural singularity (it's in Russian, with English subtitles) is distancing — we feel we're watching an impressive feat being accomplished under severe limitations, which is interesting, but maybe not quite impressive enough to eyes grown jaded from too much outsized Hollywood product. However, this is not the end of the story.

"Night Watch" is based on the first volume of a trilogy by the prominent Kazakhstani fantasy novelist Sergei Lukyanenko. (It will be published in this country, in English, in July.) A sequel based on the second volume, "Day Watch," has already been shot and, like this film, acquired for distribution by Fox Searchlight, which will step in (with more money, presumably) to co-produce the concluding installment of the story, "Dusk Watch," which will be filmed in English.

"Night Watch" may not be a fantasy classic itself (although it's certainly a watershed for the newly energized Russian film industry). But that doesn't mean that Bekmambetov and his production team haven't learned enough in making it to put the larger budgets it has merited to even more interesting use. Bring on part two.

—Kurt Loder

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