The trailer for the French film A Girl Cut In Two would have you think that the film is a taut, sexy, tense thriller about the violent love triangle between a beautiful girl and the two men who compete for her affections. What the film actually delivers is about as sexy and tense as Rush Limbaugh enjoying the effects of a painkiller binge.

Gabrielle (played by the fetching Ludivine Sagnier) is an up-and-coming weather anchor for a news station. She attracts the attention of two suitors: Charles (François Berléand), a famous author more than twice her age; and Paul (Benoît Magimel) an intolerable, spoiled heir with nothing better to do than throw hissy fits and bully people—usually simultaneously.

What could have been an intriguing story of love, jealousy, and the violence that can occur when the two intersect, never gets out of first gear. The performances are bland at their best and grating at their worst—Magimel, looking like a French Alan Cumming with his elfen face, diagonal hair, and “outrageous” clothes, has a particularly annoying screen presence—and the story is far too simple and devoid of genuine character development to effectively buoy the film.

The first half of A Girl Cut In Two is decent enough, and the relationship that develops between Charles and Gabrielle is intriguing at first, especially as the venomous Paul continues to lurk in the background, thinking bad thoughts. But once the relationship between Charles and Gabrielle ends and Gabrielle inexplicably marries Paul, the film quickly takes a nosedive. Gabrielle bounces back and forth between Charles and Paul so nonchalantly and apathetically throughout the film that she might as well be sleepwalking.

Sagnier, who achieved a modicum of fame abroad for her, um, revealing performance in the far superior thriller Swimming Pool, fails to infuse Gabrielle with the depth or internal conflict that are necessary to make her character’s plight interesting. As Charles, Berléand comes the closest to delivering something resembling a nuanced, layered performance, but once his character is relegated to the background for the film’s second half, there is nobody left to keep the audience intrigued.

The film also skirts around the issue of sex. The character of Charles is described as a libertine who subjects Gabrielle to various acts of sexual humiliation, but these events always occur offscreen, and never gel with the characters’ on-screen depictions. Depicting some of these events would have not only made the film more entertaining, but could have fleshed out the characters more and allowed the film to make more sense. From what we do see of Charles and Gabrielle’s sex life, they seem to share a perfectly healthy, slightly kinky relationship, not the twisted, abusive affair that it is later described as being.

The film has much in common with the recent Savage Grace, a film that similarly portrays the miseries of boring rich people without ever making a case for why the audience should care about them. Both films are based on “true” stories, which should render the events even more affecting, but are so sluggishly paced and stiffly acted that you’ll want to scream at the screen for someone to just kill somebody—anybody—so you can all go home. But even after its inevitable and predictable act of violence, A Girl Cut In Two lumbers on, subjecting the audience to even more boring plot developments and introducing even blander characters. And once the film finally does sputter to a halt, its sole achievement in two hours is to have been a thriller entirely devoid of thrills.

D