The opening shots of Aloft show Nana (Jennifer Connelly) at work in a scummy, disgusting pig farm. A pig screams in agony as it gives birth. In graphic detail, Nana and her coworker reach inside the pig to pull out the baby. In the next shot, Nana is bent over the pig barn’s filthy counter, boning her coworker.

This should give you a pretty good idea of what the film has to offer. It’s the kind of movie that mistakes misery for pathos, incoherence for ambiguity and long silences for depth. It indulges in all the worst instincts of 21st century indie film cliché. It’s a film where the protagonist’s family lives in a tiny ramshackle trailer, but her son has a giant pet falcon. It’s a film that thinks it has something to say about spirituality, but is as scattered as the bullshit New Age mysticism it peddles.

The film, which was shot in Manitoba, has no excuse for being this bad. A cast that includes Connelly (A Beautiful Mind), Cillian Murphy (28 Days Later), Oona Chaplin (Game of Thrones) and Mélanie Laurent (Inglourious Basterds) treads water with the tepid and nonsensical material they’re given. None of the performances are bad in the technical sense, but this is the kind of writing that can make a good performance bad: where characters speak in hippie platitudes, or where a character greets a visitor he knows is coming with “Who the fuck are you?” for no reason other than the screenwriter wants him to come across as a bristly jerk.

That screenwriter is also the director, Claudia Llosa (The Milk of Sorrow). I’m not familiar with her previous work. She gives Aloft a visual tenor that nicely matches its bleak arctic landscapes and makes me curious to see her early films. But those visuals aren’t enough to salvage the mess that is Aloft. It’s a chore from beginning to end.