Crime to you and me is something to walk to the other side of the street to avoid. In good movies about crime it's a nearly unfathomable fascination. In Arturo Ripstein's disturbing, gauzily photographed new version of the "Lonely Hearts" murders of the 1940s the story of an overweight nurse and her Latin lover who pose as brother and sister in order to seduce emotionally vulnerable women is spellbindingly re-imagined. It's also emotionally harrowing, but that, in a sense, will be part of the pleasure anyone going to the film will be going for. For some reason unfathomable crime seems like a form of philosophical encounter. I can imagine Wittgenstein, lover of pork pies and cowboy movies that he was, finding the meaningless meaning of true crime utterly gripping.

It is. Deep Crimson's story is a true one and it made headlines a half-century ago. In 1969, Leonard Kastle first adapted it as the now notorious, Z-budget cult film, The Honeymoon Killers. Ripstein follows Kastle's basic story outline, but with interpretive variations. And he transfigures it from Kastle's exploitative world to something that feels like a much larger probe. The story is set now in dusty Mexican hamlets and it unfolds with the daze of all hot days and melodrama. Despite the patches of ugliness in the film Deep Crimson is defined by its glimpses into the insides of the two killer lovers, not by how much blood they produce. That gives Deep Crimson Badlands kind of ambitions: it becomes a sepia-tinted fable about the way a murderous streak emerges from a stew of movie fantasy, popular romance, sexual greed and narcissism.

The outsize nurse this time is a hangy-lipped woman named Coral (Regina Orozco) whose breath is sour and whose uniform is as unkempt and blood-smeared as a butcher's apron. Self-absorbed and addicted to over-baked romance, Coral prepares for work by lipsticking the initials of the matinee idol Charles Boyer on her breasts. At work she slips the hand of an elderly man in her care down her uniform. It's her own magic alphabet and she wants the old man to lay his hands on it and heal the way she believes it's healed her. Or that's one possible reason. (Another is an impossible labyrinthine route that Coral travels to believe that a wheelchair-bound man is transformed into Charles Boyer). In the evening, Coral shoos away her children, plunks down on her couch and makes herself over again, writing "missives" to her "Lonely Hearts" friend, Nicolas Estrella (Daniel Gimenez Cacho).

Nicolas is a pathological grifter who seduces women by believing his own lies – and with the aid of a hair piece and an affected Castillian Spanish he manages to feed his own rank Don Juan ambitions and earn his living. After seducing the women he steals their money. But it is Coral who turns out to have the killer instinct. On meeting Nicolas she falls, much more than he does, into what the director calls a "mad love," though that expression hardly describes the tawdry glue of sentiment and criminal self-absorption that comes to bind Coral to Nicholas (and he, eventually, to her).