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Let’s get this out the way: Nobody titles their film “Eel” if they don’t want critics to reach for the adjective “slippery,” and Chu Chun-Teng’s woozily gorgeous first feature invites it from the off. Its story, slender but charged, is in a constant state of retreat, repeatedly darting into psychological and existential alleys just out of view. Its images, too, are often as elusive as they are beautiful, symbolically layered but accommodating of uncertain, Rorschach-style intuition. The chase is the thrill in “Eel,” an open-ended love story in which an atmosphere of suspended summertime yearning is sometimes cut through with gestures of brazen, unambiguous, horny human need — like a head-clearing pang, or pain, amid lapping waves of more inchoate feeling.

Arguably the most esoteric selection in the inaugural, debut-focused Perspectives competition at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, “Eel” also announces one of its most emphatically confident...