''A Wrinkle in Time,'' which appears tonight on ABC, is a mind-blowing odyssey of childhood betrayed and set right, the kind of acid fantasy that found its supreme expression in the 1960's. A passionate three-hour production, dense with special effects, the movie, based on the near-sacred 1962 text by Madeleine L'Engle, proceeds from the novel's ingenious premise: a father who leaves his family is a cosmic traitor. With some malign sorcery, covered over with lies, he shatters peace, leaving in its place a terrifying new universe: ''The Broken Home,'' as James Merrill titled a great poem of domestic dissolution in 1966.

As Meg Murry (Katie Stuart), the movie's heroine, puts it: ''Dad left us. No word. Just left.''

And now she must get him back.

This is not healthy. In a certified contemporary movie, a child intent on reuniting her family would have to learn at length that sometimes parents stop loving each other, but they still love you, and you'll understand someday and blah blah. But ''A Wrinkle in Time'' is not a public-service announcement, blessedly; it is a warped, even sick story of sorrow, vengeance and transcendence, set largely among exploding stars.

The action opens on a supine couple staring at the sky, and then at each other. This is a backward glance at Meg's lost Eden with her father, Jack Murry, a handsome astrophysicist of infinite understanding. It looks like an unwholesome love scene, for which the movie doesn't apologize. When her father is gone, Meg realizes with annoyance that she misses him more than her mother does. She caresses his photograph.

The explanation Meg receives for her father's disappearance -- that he has lost his way while traveling through time -- is no less intelligible than any such explanations. It is, in fact, more intelligible than ''girlfriend/crisis/time to himself.''

On a stormy night, to the pounding of ecclesiastical music, Meg and her psychic brother, Charles Wallace (David Dorfman), are swept away to outer space, where they're to retrieve their father with the guidance of three witch figures: Mrs. Whatsit (Alfre Woodard), Mrs. Which (Kate Nelligan), and Mrs. Who (Alison Elliott). Along for the ride is Meg's quasi-suitor, a young athlete named Calvin O'Keefe (Gregory Smith) who escapes his own family troubles. (A flashback shows a shrieking mother.)

The witches, to my mind, are too picturesque. I would have liked to see them presented more simply, evocations of the kind of grieving feminists to whom it falls to redress the suffering of children, even when it means ceding them to their fathers.

Meg, Charles Wallace and Calvin eventually arrive on Camazotz, a fascist planet presided over by the demagogue Prime Coordinator (Kyle Secor), an amber-eyed villain who determines to corrupt Charles Wallace from the inside. A hodgepodge of dystopias from Orwell and Soviet novels, the world is stifling. (''Alike and equal are not the same thing!'' Meg cries out, reprising the desperate message from cold war days.) Charles Wallace's corruption must be stopped so that the father, by now a sniveling prisoner, can be brought home.

''There's a lie here,'' Meg Murry tells her plastic-faced mother about two-thirds of the way through the movie, on a brief return home. Her mother is adjusting to life without her husband. As in some of the best children's stories, the mother is the enemy of freedom.

Ms. L'Engle told Newsweek recently that she doesn't like this movie, a presentation of ''The Wonderful World of Disney.'' Certainly the filmmakers -- with their unpolished, raw-looking interstellar sequences -- fail to dazzle and enchant with the glamorous perfection of the ''Harry Potter'' and ''Lord of the Rings'' movies. The mythology here is full of incongruities, and the plot is as hard to follow as an adventure recounted by a breathless child.

But the film is also sad, and soaring. It recalls the hippie days when a perverse, hubristic originality was a quality to be cultivated, not medicated. Told not from an aloof remove -- through the eyes of a wise Yoda or Peter Jackson -- the movie glitters irregularly, woven through with the sparkling fibers of a righteous child's tormented imagination. Steven Spielberg also attempted, with the same ambiguous but moving results, this messier brand of science fiction in ''A.I.''

What's at the heart of it is curiosity about evil, uninhibited curiosity, inspired by the betrayal of adults. The movie investigates what Merrill remembers as ''a blackness found, if ever now, in old/Engravings where the acid bit./I must have needed to touch it.''

THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF DISNEY
A Wrinkle in Time
ABC, Tonight at 8, Eastern and Pacific times; 7, Central time

Directed by John Kent Harrison; produced by Fitch Cady; written by Susan Shilliday; based on the novel by Madeleine L'Engle; music by Jeff Danna; edited by Susan Maggi. Produced by BLT Productions, Fireworks International and Dimension in association with Kerner Entertainment.

WITH: Chris Potter (Dr. Jack Murry), Katie Stuart (Meg), David Dorfman (Charles Wallace), Gregory Smith (Calvin O'Keefe), Alfre Woodard (Mrs. Whatsit), Alison Elliott (Mrs. Who), Kate Nelligan (Mrs. Which) and Kyle Secor (Prime Coordinator).