Starring Karine Vanasse and Cory Monteith. Rated 14A.

Quebec’s Karine Vanasse was the brightest spot of the benighted PanAm series, and she works hard to anchor the too aptly named All The Wrong Reasons, which can’t decide whether it wants you to laugh, cry, or see what’s in the cinema next door.

There’s nothing funny about Vanasse’s character, Kate, a wan security worker so traumatized by an initially unspecified event she won’t let anyone touch her. That includes husband James (Glee’s Cory Monteith in his penultimate film appearance), mild manager of a big-box store in Halifax. They haven’t had sex in over a year, and meds have left her zombielike at home and work. No huge surprise, then, that he’s attracted to a trashy clerk played by Emily Hampshire, who often embodies working-class trouble in Canadian films.

Kate, meanwhile, is more nobly attracted to decent Simon, a firefighter who lost his hand in an accident on the job and grabs a gig at the store during his rehabilitation. Air Bud graduate Kevin Zegers provides a kind of soulful physicality missing from the rest of the cast (Monteith is particularly wooden), although it never occurred to me that Simon was supposed to be Irish until his accent changed halfway through a later scene with his broguetastic fire chief (Daniel Lillford).

There are plenty of amateurish mistakes in the weakly written first feature by writer-director Gia Milani, who attempts to lighten things with bad comic relief from the fairly undifferentiated people who work at the store—a bland setting for this needlessly two-hour tale. Her decision to punish some of her own characters while praising others remains mysteriously random, but a few outside scenes of wintry Nova Scotia seem to have been shot for the right reasons.