“The Wedding Guest” soon reveals that it has one of the most misleading titles of the year. It’s a thriller, not a light comedy of manners — but exactly what sort of thriller it will be is something that the director, Michael Winterbottom, keeps tantalizingly at bay.

When we meet Jay (Dev Patel), a stoic, handsome man of mystery, he is departing London for Pakistan. He rents a car and, on what appears to be a lengthy, less-than-straightforward route, stops at a gun shop. We eventually learn he’s looking for a woman named Samira (Radhika Apte). And when he finds her, he ties her up and puts her in the trunk.

Winterbottom, the globe-trotting, genre-hopping British filmmaker, has done well with dark territory before (the 2010 Jim Thompson adaptation “The Killer Inside Me”). And if in the past he’s come across like a dabbler — a director more interested in trying different styles than engaging with any one of them — here, his restless, touristic tendencies suit what might otherwise have been a rote on-the-lam scenario.

The filmmaker wrote the script himself, and read no further to keep the surprises fresh. Samira was indeed about to attend a wedding — her own, to a groom not of her choosing. Jay was hired by Deepesh (Jim Sarbh), the boyfriend the Pakistani-born Samira, who spent part of her upbringing in Britain, has kept secret from her traditional parents. She can go back and get married if she wants, Jay tells her. But if she goes with Deepesh, she’ll never stop running. (It might have been easier to pose this choice before the abduction — and before Jay killed a man during the getaway — but this is a movie that places pacing above sense.)

Deepesh is not the most reliable of paramours, and as Jay and Samira cross into India to meet him, “The Wedding Guest” turns into a rush of international cellphone calls, hotel hideouts, false identities and phony jewels. The scenery, nicely shot by Giles Nuttgens and covering a wide swath of the country — Amritsar, New Delhi, Jaipur and Goa — is always great, and Patel and Apte’s chemistry approaches scalding levels as their characters grow closer.

Despite all the bobbing and weaving, Winterbottom knows when to pause the proceedings for a ripe, noirish exchange.

“Are you going to kill me?”

“I should.”

“Can I trust you?”

“No.”

For all its absurdities, “The Wedding Guest” makes it tough not to anticipate how that conversation will pan out.

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‘The Wedding Guest’ is rated R for guns and getaways. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.