IF THERE’S anything more annoying than a dumb film that rejoices in its dumbness, it’s a dumb film that thinks itself smart.

Oh look at me. I star Willem Dafoe and Julia Roberts as the warring parents of a sensitive child who will grow up into a wounded novelist. I take place over a weekend in the country, during which, following a sudden death, the family gathers to mourn and to work through various simmering tensions. Aren’t I great?

Fireflies in the Garden? With its sophomoric doffing of the hat to Robert Frost, the title alone is enough to set off warning bells. You just know that some form of dubious transcendence will accompany the appearance of those insects in the darkening yard. After all, that's what would happen in the drowsy off-Broadway play that the film should have become.

Dennis Lee’s debut alternates (without bothering to modify fashions or hairstyles) between the present and 20 years ago. In that grim past, young Michael is forced to deal with a father whose every twitch, grunt and gesture reveals a bubbling, unforgiving psychosis. Two decades on, Michael has grown up into the unlikely shape of Ryan Reynolds, while Willem Dafoe remains Willem Dafoe. When Ma Roberts is killed in a car crash, old conflicts burst to the surface.

The film might have survived the surprising casting (Hayden Panetierre as a young Emily Watson?) and the outbreaks of sentimentality if it weren’t so laden down with clumsy symbolism and gimcrack philosophy.

We begin with a shot of a clock. When Michael and his hitherto estranged partner (Carrie-Anne Moss) hump on the bed, the camera closes in on the clock radio. Michael wears an absurd watch that is only marginally smaller than the clock that Flava Flav of Public Enemy used to wear round his neck. Fireflies in the Gardenis about time,you see.

So oppressively dull and clumsy is the main body of the picture that the flashbacks to Dad’s abuse of Michael – energising in its nastiness – actually come as something of a relief. Will the boy, you wonder, grow up to be the second Green Goblin?

Also opening

Opening today without any Irish media previews, surely not because it was critically panned when it opened in the US last month, is Obsessed(15A cert, gen release, 108 min). In its scenario, life seems idyllic for a successful businessman (Idris Alba from The Wire) and his wife (Beyoncé Knowles) until he hires a temp (Ali Larter from Heroes) who stalks him.