I don’t know much about cinema, and the critics seem to have enjoyed this film, so you may want to take my view with a pinch of salt… but I did not enjoy this “psychological thriller”.

The film is set on an island where a unique flower grows. This flower induces amnesia in those who come into dermal contact with it or ingest it. In an astounding coincidence, ingestion or injection with the venom of a species of snake native to the same island acts as an antidote.

A tech billionaire hires a workforce to kill the snakes on sight, lures women to the island, exposes them to the flower, and violently rapes them, leaving them with no memory of the event. These are not the actions of a criminal mastermind. You can already see the slithering flaw in this genius’s plan—I suspect you are not psychologically thrilled.

You may even have exported from that scenario a neatly packaged solution to the genius’s oversight—but, alas, you’re in danger of spoiling a plot point in the very last scene of the film.

But plot isn’t everything: perhaps I enjoyed the cinematography, the emotional set pieces, and the allegory? I’m afraid not.

The cinematography was poorly matched to the script. Extremely violent, distressing scenes were graphically realised, only to be undercut by lines of dialogue that made the cinema audience laugh out loud. There is something maniacal about about filming scenes disturbing enough to warrant a trigger warning before the start of the film and yet undercutting their impact to this degree.

The script also didn’t deliver on emotional set pieces. There’s a scene in which the antagonist repeatedly yells ‘I’m sorry’—a moment that every cue suggests is supposed to tense and emotionally charged—yet it is so utterly absurd and overcooked that it, too, raised a notable titter from the audience at my screening.

Allegory, it seemed to me, was absent. Or, at least, in light of the peculiarly pitched ending, there was no allegory I was interested in unveiling: it seemed to be sailing close to suggesting that financial success represented outsized recompense for suffering unfathomable trauma—and that inflicting abuse was a reasonable trade-off for securing that reward. Others have mentioned the film’s sharp take on gender politics and wealth inequality—I didn’t see what they saw.

I’d say something about the acting, but the script was so leaden that I don’t think even the world’s best actors could have saved it. Those who were cast certainly couldn’t, but it feels wrong to criticise them for that.

As I say, this interpretation seems to swim against the mainstream of critical opinion, so I might be talking nonsense—perhaps I missed the point.

But for me, the biggest failure of all in this film was that it was mindlessly boring. It’s been a long time since I last walked out of a film partway through, but I came close to doing so during this one. I can’t recommend it.