A gay Irishman navigates the dangers and disappearances of AIDS-era London in David Turpin's bruise-tender debut feature.

It’s at the tail of its closing credit scroll that “Ancestors” drops its final, plainly worded message, also setting its title in context: “No survivors, only descendants.” As the sign-off for this heartbroken drama of connections made and lost as AIDS ravaged London’s queer community in the late 1980s, it’s a lyrical rejoinder to anyone who attaches some manner of virtue to having lived through the crisis; a reminder, too, that the spirit of those who died too soon is still carried by those born into a safer, more permissive era. This auspicious first feature by Irish writer-director David Turpin is often poetically complex in sentiment but rawly direct in feeling; it overreaches here and there, only to pull back and punch you right in the gut.

Recently premiered at the Toronto Film Festival — where it took the FIPRESCI critics’ prize — “Ancestors” is the kind of sensual, earnestly emotive queer filmmaking that should have a particularly successful run on the international LGBTQ fest circuit. There, it is likely to bridge audiences old enough to remember the events at hand with those as young as the leading players on screen, while distributors and platforms specializing in queer storytelling are sure to take an interest. The film should benefit, too, from the steadily rising profile of its superb leading man Éanna Hardwicke, seen last year to wildly different if equally impressive effect as Irish soccer firebrand Roy Keane in the biopic “Saipan.”

Here embodying a strong-and-silent persona, crucial to a film that is intelligently alive to different facets of masculinity and how they support one another, Hardwicke plays Beau, a twentysomething Irishman who years ago fled the country where his very identity was illegal. The year is 1988, and London is still a refuge for all manner of queer men who had to leave home to come home, so to speak. Those include Maurice (Rupert Everett), the aging proprietor of the shabby café where Beau works, who sees himself as a nurturing “auntie” for various waifs and strays in the community; among those strays, meanwhile, is Tiny (Jack Wolfe, Netflix’s “Shadow and Bone”), a directionless, barely-of-age hustler whom Beau, in turn, gradually takes under his wing.

A bed for the night grows into a roommate situation; there’s no spark of romance between the two men but a deeper, more empathetic kind of love, and when Tiny is diagnosed with AIDS, Beau feels a particular duty of care to him. But Tiny, forever susceptible to addictions and flirtations, is hard to hold down, and when he eventually stops coming home, the city’s gay bars, clubs and cruising grounds meld into a ceaselessly looping, frustrating maze, rife with shadows to enfold anyone who wishes to disappear. Beau’s search for Tiny is also, in a sense, an inevitable pursuit of his own fears; clear delineations of past and present, or reality and reverie, blur as “Ancestors” sometimes segues into heady dreamscapes.

Not every swerve is successful. A recurring fantasy sees Beau conversing with Gloria (Christina Hendricks) — one of several golden-age Hollywood sirens adorning Maurice’s living-room wall, re-envisioned as a fabulous ferrywoman of queer souls to their own afterlife. Shot in satiny monochrome, in contrast to the grainy, muddied, neon-flecked pastels in which DP Patrick Jordan bathes the film’s waking action, these sequences feel a heavy-handed contrivance in a film otherwise so delicate, and not obviously born of Beau’s own imagination. Hardwicke’s performance, meanwhile, is so exquisite, and so specific — the character’s vulnerabilities brimming oh so close to his placidly macho surface, his rangy physicality slowly crumpling as time and hope go by — that we feel we know his imagination fairly well.

But any such miscalculations are forgivable in a film that otherwise finds such rich and inventive figurative language, both verbal and visual, for an oft-documented chapter of queer history. In many ways, “Ancestors” actually plays as a sinuous, intuitive counterpart to fellow fall festival premiere “Elsinore,” about actor Ian Charleson’s reckoning with his AIDS diagnosis in much the same patch of London, patrolled in both films by wimple-wearing activists the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence; it’s not hard to imagine Beau brushing shoulders with Charleson at some bar or other. Which isn’t to put these two films, with their contrasting approaches and audiences, in opposition to each other — recognizing kinship between queer people and properties is very much the point of Turpin’s soaringly ambitious, eminently open-hearted debut.