Starring Bruce Greenwood and Xavier Dolan. Rating unavailable.

On a stage you can get away with a one-room story, extended talk about elephants, and carefully contrived interruptions and entrances. But the world of film is unforgiving, and director Charles Binamé’s stylized shots of a 1960s-era institution just can’t disguise the fact that Elephant Song had its start as a talky play.

It’s 1966 and a doctor has gone missing. Bruce Greenwood’s mental-hospital director, Dr. Green, sets about interrogating the last patient seen with him—Michael (Xavier Dolan). Michael feeds the doctor an elaborate array of lies and red herrings, manipulating him into believing several different stories about the psychologist’s fate, while also confronting Green about his own family dysfunction.

At the same time, the film jumps back and forth in time, intercutting the questioning in a small room with Green’s interrogation by a superior who’s investigating the disappearance. But this is a whodunnit without any tension—no real “who” and nothing really “dun”.

Greenwood does his best with a thankless job, essentially submitting to the pranks of a petulant man-child while wearing an expression of weary patience. Dolan (the Quebec wunderkind who directed Mommy) is a little too showy as the master manipulator who recites elephant facts. (They’re the only animals that can shed tears; they gestate for 22 years…) Catherine Keener brings a little grit as a ward nurse. But Nicolas Billon, who’s adapted his own play here, works in too many other contri­vances: she’s Green’s ex-wife, they lost a child, it’s Christmas Eve, and Green’s new partner keeps interrupting his therapy/interrogation sessions with phone calls. And let’s not even go into Michael’s flashbacks to an opera-singing mother and an elephant-hunting dad.

Binamé aces the midcentury period, with long closeups on its period-appropriate cigarettes and tape recorders, and Greenwood and Keener do their best with limited characterizations. But the elephant in the room is that there’s more talk than story here.