English actor Ian McShane, 81, is perhaps best known for his work in the “John Wick” series, a small part of an illustrious career. He delivers a slyly elegiac performance in the offbeat, hit-man drama “American Star.” The film is named after the American cruise ship launched in 1939 that ran aground while being towed in 1992 in the Canary Islands, where the film was shot. The ship subsequently broke in two and in the mythology of the film is still visible from the beach.

“American Star” begins with the arrival of veteran assassin Wilson (McShane), who is on a mission to murder a German known to stay in a house on the windswept Canary island of Fuerteventura. But when Wilson arrives at the house with a handgun, he finds no one. Advised to leave by a minder (Adam Nagaitis, TV’s “The Terror”), Wilson insists on finishing the job. In order to await the German’s arrival, Wilson checks into a luxury, beach-side hotel in Puerto del Rosario, where he meets Max (the talented Oscar Coleman), a lonely child whom Wilson befriends. At a small nearby bar, Wilson also meets young bartender Gloria (Paris-born Nora Arnezeder). She quickly becomes Wilson’s companion.

We get a lot of to-ing and fro-ing in “American Star” with Wilson driving his black SUV across the desert-like landscape of Fuerteventura. Is he stranded in “The Twilight Zone?” Will the “target” ever arrive? Will his young minder, with whom Wilson has a strong paternal relationship,  ever stop following him in his big, also black Range Rover? What do we make of the black, bird-like tattoo on Wilson’s chest? Gloria, who rides a motorcycle, begins to accompany Wilson on his drives as his guide. They even take a trip to see the stranded cruise ship, a giant, rusting metaphor. Max is often sitting in the corridor outside the hotel room he shares with his arguing parents (Wilson stays just a few doors down).

Three kinds of people live in Fuerteventura, Wilson opines: locals, tourists and renegades. Wilson has a lunch date with Gloria and her mother Anne, played with mystery and vulnerability by the great French actress Fanny Ardant (“The Woman Next Door”). Wilson brings flowers for Anne and dances with her.

Two thirds of the way into the film, we have no sign of the German aka the target. Wilson’s minder informs him that Gloria isn’t just anybody. She did time in both a French and a British prison. Is Anne really Gloria’s mother? Is there some greater masquerade going on?

Directed by Spanish filmmaker Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego (“Apollo 18”), who directed McShane in the Western crime drama “The Hollow Point” (2016), and written by Goya Award-winner Nacho Faerna, “American Star” is more than a bit of a mind twister. Wilson appears to be on an elaborate voyage to the Isle of Death. Several of the people he “meets,” including Gloria, Anne and Max, suggest figures out of his past. The landscape – all funnels and flats – is unreal. Virtually by will, McShane, an actor of tremendous power and authority in possession one of the screen’s most distinctive vocal instruments, holds this existential enigma together. Enthralled, we watch and wait.

(“American Star” contains profanity and bloody violence)

“American Star”

Rated R. On VOD.

Grade: B+