Before I talk about Morvern Callar, the offbeat new film by talented Ratcatcher director Lynne Ramsey, I must say that I am always predisposed to enjoy any film that substitutes subtlety, mystery and ambiguity for connect-the-dots cliché and overt explanation. There are so few films today with the guts to defy Hollywood test marketing, that when one comes along and seems defiantly strange, eerie and unconcerned with traditional characters and situations, you might be inclined to give it a pass based strictly upon those merits.

In Morvern Callar, however, - a bizarre and thoroughly un-engaging character study of an apathetic young Scottish woman who nonchalantly conceals her lover's suicide, and inexplicably appropriates his completed novel - the mix of offbeat elements, ultimately add up to nothing more than a technically stylized and dramatically shapeless directorial exercise.

Morvern Callar (Samantha Morton) is what you might casually refer to as a Goth, Gen-Y young woman of the variety that you pass on the street each day without more than a casual glance.

When we first meet her in the film's hypnotic opening scene, she's lying in a darkened room, illuminated by a flashing Christmas tree, next to the corpse of her former boyfriend, dead of an apparent suicide.

What she does next is intriguing, as she opts not to call the police, turn over the body or clean up the mess. She takes her time, lying in wait, methodically deciding how to handle the situation. After the shock has worn off and she's buried his body, she sees his unpublished manuscript as a way out of her dreary existence as a supermarket check-out girl with no options and a dead-end future.

After passing the novel off as her own and securing a publishing commitment, she embarks on an apparent voyage of self-discovery to Spain. It's here that the film opens up and releases us from the grips of Morvern's claustrophobic world, and though she appears to be liberated in a low-key type way, we're never quite sure of what or whom.

A big part of the problem is that Morvern herself lives within a vacuum, with apparently no familial and very little emotional attachment to anyone, other than a girlfriend she works along side at the local supermarket. Though we learn she occasionally hangs out in late-night nightclubs, we know next to nothing about Morvern's past or present emotional attachments. We have no sense of what drives this particular young woman, who she was before the seemingly tragic event, why she behaves in such a strange fashion afterwards.

We're never let in on much about Morvern's odd motivations, which range from casual theft to gruesome bodily dismemberment. For most of the film, she wanders around in a rather disaffected funk. We keep waiting, patiently, for the film to catch up with her, to move forward with some bit of plot or momentum, for her to come to some moment of truth or revelation about her decisions and lifestyle. But nothing ever comes.

Some might argue that the distanced, objective gaze of the camera, and Morvern's seeming inability to connect to the "real world" are the strengths of the film. While that might hold true at a conceptual level, what's on the screen plays like a movie with all of the dramatic scenes missing. I know that in "real" life sometimes people behave in unexplainable ways and live on the periphery of reality, sometimes for entire lifetimes. But in the movies, without some sort of real-world context to juxtapose with the absurdity, it doesn't make for satisfying storytelling.

It's obvious to us that Morvern is definitely sociopathic or even psychotic, which the film absolutely refuses to deal with, taking no position whatsoever on any of her actions. We have no idea how the film feels about her. And we have no idea how to feel about her either.

Morvern Callar, while it pretends to say something about the behavior of disaffected youth - or at least, this one - comes up short, adding up to little more than a pretentious and ultimately unsatisfying mood trip, rendered too abstractly by a defiantly non-commercial director.

Samantha Morton, the gifted young actress who shone so brightly in Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown, and was equally impressive in last year's Minority Report, is left twisting in the wind. Her usually expressive and penetrating eyes seem, sadly, to have glazed over with an apathy that seems less about the mysteries of her character and more about an actress adrift in an underwritten script. And though she appears heavier here and is often unflatteringly photographed, Morton's nuanced acting gifts keep us interested - at least, for awhile - anticipating something rich to come.

But the script never gives her anything much to connect with, so there's little emotional investment from the audience or any onscreen impact. She's an alien, more or less, in the way she sleepwalks through even the most extreme of situations, and we're never able to access her almost rudimentary detachment.

As David Lynch proved in his superb, labyrinthine Mulholland Drive, it's possible to have your characters hold their cards close and fumble through the mysteries of the psyche and dark regions of the human heart, along the way offering some fascinating behavior and an intelligent payoff.

Director Ramsay would do well to invest her character with as much energy and style as she does her aesthetic. This is above all, a director's film, and Ramsey can be credited for some truly inventive cinematography, and use of music and sound effects. She's obviously trying to say something about Morvern's lack of conscience, apathy and unwillingness to face reality. But Ramsey's script is too subtle, too mysterious and too dramatically slack.