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Perhaps you know the feeling, the strange tingle of vertigo you get when you’re having an entirely normal conversation with an acquaintance, and you suddenly realize that for seemingly no reason — and often about the most inconsequential things — they are lying to you. Jöns Jönsson’s “Axiom,” a standout in this year’s Berlinale Encounters section, is physically set in a comfortably well-educated, middle-class Austrian environment. But its psychological terrain is discomfort. This is a fascinatingly perceptive film about casual falsehoods, compulsive fakery and crumbling facades.

Appropriately, then, it begins in an art gallery. Julius is a museum attendant, moving soundlessly from room to room, politely chiding visitors who take photos or drink from water bottles. What he doesn’t do, and what Johannes Louis’ deceptively anodyne camera never allows him to do, is fade into the background the way museum attendants should. You are always conscious of him there,...