Starring Nicole Kidman. Rating unavailable.

A molasses-paced mood piece smothered in its own portentousness, Strangerland is made even more frustrating by the obvious commitment of a cast that keeps trying, and failing, to invest it with meaning and real emotion.

Nicole Kidman deserves kudos for (sometimes) making you forget you’re watching Nicole Kidman as Catherine Parker, a mother struggling with life in a nowhere town at the ass end of the Australian outback. Catherine seems disconnected from pharmacist husband Matthew, played by Joseph Fiennes, whom we haven’t seen often since his Shakespeare in Love heyday. (Apparently, we haven’t missed much.)

These two don’t have much grip on their kids: 11-ish Tommy (Nicholas Hamilton), who tends to wander during the night, and 15-year-old Lily (Maddison Brown), who is floating away on a sea of hormones. Those local skate punks look pretty thuggish, all right.

First-time feature filmmaker Kim Farrant, working from a flat script, seems to think that mannered atmospherics can supply the drama all by themselves. Unfortunately, when you strip away the red-saturated night scenes, histrionic close-ups, dread-inducing music, and an unusually garish caricature of human sexuality, there isn’t enough story to spread over the movie’s almost two-hour slog.

We gradually learn that the family moved to this sun-parched hellhole after Lily’s behaviour fouled their previous nest. The story keeps promising revelations intended to shock, or at least explain why the couple no longer sleep together and are so quick to trade bitter accusations.

With the arrival of The Matrix’s Hugo Weaving as a sober-minded local cop, you start thinking someone’s around to Agent Smith the story into action. But when answers do arrive, they are generally too mundane to justify all that buildup.

The rest remains verrrrrry mysterious—just not in ways that anyone is likely to care about.