Tony Manero *** 1/2 (R; 1:37): His name is Raul, but if you ask him, he’ll tell you it’s Tony Manero—or John Travolta. He’s 52 and lives in the slums of Santiago, Chile, during the murderous reign of right-wing strongman Augusto Pinochet. Raul is a murderer too, and like Pinochet he believes it’s for a noble cause: to fund a stage production of “Saturday Night Fever” in a working-class restaurant and lend some glamour to the neighborhood.

Pablo Larrain’s “Tony Manero” is a chillingly intimate and uninflected horror movie, shot in the neo-realist style of an art film. We never learn anything about Raul’s past or personality, except that he’s a narcisstically driven “entertainer” who consumes whatever is handy. He bludgeons a junkyard proprietor to get glass blocks for a lighted dance floor. He shatters a mirror and glues the pieces to a kid’s soccer ball to make a disco prop. He has rough sex with his mother-and-daughter co-stars and escapes out the back door while Pinochet’s goons roust the communist choreographer who would have been his chief competition in a televised contest for Travolta impersonators.

The bitter joke is that star Alfredo Castro looks more like Al Pacino than he does Travolta, and his studied dance moves have no soul. But in Chile in the 1970s, soul was a commodity the people could not afford.

(In Spanish with subtitles. Screens Friday through Sunday at 8 p.m. in Moore Auditorium at Webster University.)

–Joe Williams