In keeping with a tradition otherwise upheld only by Pixar, The Square is preceded by a nine-minute short called Spider—a hilarious macabre hoodwink, clean as clockwork, with nastily prankish timing. This appetizer got my mouth watering; it should have set the tone for the feature to come, which was produced by the same team of Aussie amateurs. Let’s just say that the entrée’s title might well be autobiographical.

Structurally, The Square has a fine film noir skeleton, but no meat on top of it. It has a paucity of wisecracks, a perfunctory romance, and a complete deficiency of glamour. In other words, a set-up, a moral, and one bad deed after another—which is adequate, if not my idea of a good time. This is the first feature that former stuntman Nash Edgerton (you might remember his body, if not his face, from The Matrix Revolutions and episodes II and III of Star Wars) directed; it was written by his brother Joel (an actor who plays an arsonist here) and Matthew Dabner. But there’s little derring-do for stunts to shine through, and no interesting characters for performers to embody. They’ve brought nothing new to the genre, but retained its clichés: How did this pair of marital cheats end up with their original spouses (a marginalized housewife, bland as bean paste, and a Blue Collar Comedy Tour roadie with no discernible career aside from unspecified malefic schemes)? Edgerton’s plotting is studious and style deterged; but there’s no passion or pleasure—as in Broken Embraces and Shutter Island—merely precision.

In a way, Edgerton’s myopic dedication to this threadbare plot, and the few raggedy characters that dangle in it, has a vision. The seaside setting—a town too generic to warrant a name—constitutes the movie’s entire universe. Although it’s in Australia—the accents and Christmastime picnics and cans of Jack Daniel’s and Cola (say whaaa?) bespeak that—this place seems like those pockets of Americana, otherwise invisible, that old sitcoms were once contained in, at a remove from the somber realities of the world beyond. It’s like Lumberton in Blue Velvet—an aw-shucks idyll with big-city crime rotting out its edges—except here all classes of life blot together in a surreally convenient way. Though they have the appurtenances of modern life on the outside, inwardly, these characters live in some gloamy gray area before The Simpsons and The Truman Show. Edgerton probably only intended to keep things simple and economical, but the effect is peculiarly unsettling: an empty, farcical world, complete with a sitcom stock company—yet without humor, or much levity of any kind. Even the assignations are chillingly banal. The lovers long to escape—but where to? In terms of atmosphere, The Square is like The Ghost Writer’s insensate kid brother—like an existential drama by a prisoner who didn’t even know he was incarcerated.

The Square isn’t a showcase of the Edgertons’ creativity—only their craftsmanship. But they do show promise, and, once given the freer rein of a bigger budget, perhaps their imaginations will be unloosed. For obvious reasons, they’ve been compared to the Coen brothers, and hopefully that compliment will prove auspicious. The Coens’ first feature, Blood Simple, was also a pared-down noir. And it was also overrated.