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There’s plenty of wit to be found in the films that constitute the Romanian New Wave, but any laughs they elicit wind up sounding more like dry coughs. These movies tend to find their humor in subjects like an overburdened health-care system (“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu”), corruption in the education system (“Graduation”), family strife (“Sieranevada”) and other topics relevant to the nation dealing with the lingering aftereffects of the Ceausescu era.

So even if writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu seems more amenable to absurdist comedy — and genre conventions — than his peers in this talented community, his latest film “The Whistlers” still traffics in bleak chuckles.

It’s a wonderfully labyrinthine story of cops and robbers that might not be an official sequel to Porumboiu’s 2009 “Police, Adjective” (that year’s Romanian Oscar entry), but it does explore many of that film’s concerns, from the subtle distinctions between law and...