A fishing community on a remote Maine island finds itself suddenly cut off from the rest of the world after the ferry stops coming. When people start to vanish, the terrified survivors realize that someone – or something – is hunting them.

It all started out so innocently. A man lounging in the sun, sipping on mixed drinks with his tiny dog. His performance is animated, there’s some humor, bright colors, all the trappings of a decent watch. How could it all go so wrong? The dog dies, the man dies, and we find ourselves transported to Island Zero, an island off the coast of Maine shrouded by a constant gray pallor, foreshadowing the dreary chore that is to come.

The majority of the film takes place inside of what we can assume is the only diner on the island, but it might as well be the only building since every character of any significance in this film is in the diner at any given time. The island is connected to the mainland via a single ferry and wouldn’t you know it, all the people on the island need to get to the mainland on the same day the ferry goes missing and there aren’t any other boats available, because this narrative is a Rube Goldberg machine of plot contrivances. For the next hour, we wait for the ferry to arrive. That’s all there is. Every 20 minutes or so there will be some blood on a tree or we’ll hear more about how the fish are dying, but beyond that, we’re left to flounder in the insufferable din of cardboard characters prattling on about the dead fish and how they would very much prefer it if the ferry arrived.

I’ll just go ahead and list the characters and their motivations; it won’t take long. There’s Maggie (Laila Robins), a doctor who wants to go visit her family; Sam (Adam Wade McLaughlin), a marine biologist whose wife died and now is obsessed with the dying fish on the island; Lucy (Teri Reeves), Sam’s girlfriend who is leaving him because of his fish obsession and because she got a job on the mainland; Titus (Matthew Wilkas), a handsomely-dimpled writer who came to the island temporarily to write his book; and Jessie (Joanna Clarke), a waitress with dreams of being whisked off her feet and away from the island. It’s an hour of watching actors die inside as they’re given no liberty to actually emote or express themselves. The film taken as the sum of its parts is not staggeringly incompetent. There is no particular component that can be pointed to that makes for such a notably unpleasant experience, but the compounding of mediocrities creates a noxious formula that creeps up on you until you’re questioning how you got where you are and if it will ever end. By day 6 of the missing ferry ordeal—I know it was day 6 by the marks I made on the wall—I started to feel as though I was having a psychotic episode, with every minute seeming like it took 10 and leaving me wondering if I had entered purgatory and I would spend the rest of time watching this film. You could argue that the film is a slow burn and I simply didn’t have the patience to give it a chance, but I loved The Witch and even sat through the entirety of Begotten, a film that’s basically 90 minutes of a guy having a seizure being dragged through the desert.

Perhaps the saddest part of this whole thing is that there is a story hiding in here. You’ll never see it because it lies beyond the crucible of boredom that is the majority of this film and even if you manage to survive the slog, you will be so desensitized that it could be the best climax ever put to film and you won’t be able to appreciate it, but it’s there. While Island Zero meanders around in no hurry to make you feel anything, killing off random side characters dying off-screen, finally with its dying breath it introduces plot lines out of thin air that should have been developed far earlier and starts at least attempting to introduce some drama by killing off characters that we’ve actually spent some time with and giving the cast something to react to.

Island Zero is a drama where nothing dramatic happens, or perhaps it’s a horror movie without scares, effects, or a notable monster. Either way, it doesn’t seem to accomplish anything it sets out to do until it’s fevered sprint in the final 20 minutes where we at least meet the monster along with some decent practical gore effects and some degree of dramatic tension. Perhaps with some major edits to pacing and allowing these plot threads introduced in the final act to be developed more fully it would be possible to give this a light recommendation, but as it is I can’t imagine recommending this over any budget slasher or zombie movie you might find while browsing Amazon Prime.