And as for seeing the dead people, well, Alba (Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Into the Blue) is very good at looking very good -- she is unquestionably a beautiful woman -- but she’s quite terrible at looking very scared, or very traumatized, or very determined to find out exactly why she’s seeing dead people in the first place. She’s quite terrible at making us feel anything for her at all. Except bored. She’s very good at making us feel agonizingly bored, which suggests that she may be in the wrong line of work: there are not a lot of acting jobs that intentionally call for a deliberate attempt to bore the audience.

Once there is, though, Alba will be set for life.

What happens is this: blind violinist Sydney Wells gets a cornea transplant, and she starts seeing weird things with her new eyes. Like the ghost of a little dead kid wearing bubble wrap who is, it seems, meant to be creepy, and isn’t. (The directing team of David Moreau and Xavier Palud may have to share some of the blame with Alba for the yawning blandness of the movie.) Like people in a Chinese restaurant who actually died weeks before in a fire. (This may be some sort of oblique reference to the fact that The Eye is ripped off-- er, a remake of a Chinese horror film.) Like howling, shadowy spectres who accompanying the newly dead off to wherever dead people go when they leave this plane of existence.

It takes about 45 minutes -- half the film’s running time, though it feels much longer -- to set up what could have been set up in the first 10 minutes, so that we could move on to some real story. But instead we are treated to the dubious spectacles of Sydney breaking every lamp in her apartment because, apparently, seeing all the weird stuff is driving her crazy and she wants to be blind again. The lamps are new, a post-operation present from her sister, played by slumming indie queen Parker Posey (Superman Returns, For Your Consideration), who looks, if possible, more bored than we are. Her level of cinematic ennui is outdone, however, by the very fine actor Alessandro Nivola (The Clearing, Laurel Canyon), as Sydney’s therapist, who’s supposed to be helping her learn how to live in a sighted world and mostly just treats her like a pretty little dimbulb for complaining about seeing dead people: Nivola looks like he’s actually in creative pain here.

When we finally do get to something that’s meant to be story, and not storytelling groundwork, that turns out to be fairly preposterous, but not, alas, in that bad-movie way that is at least entertaining in its ridiculousness. No: After Sydney discovers who her cornea donor was, and why she’s seeing dead people, we come to an ending that is meant to be sad and ironic but just absurd and laughable... or it would be laughable if it tried just a little harder.

Oh, all right: I suppose screenwriter Sebastian Gutierrez gets a dose of the blame for the tedious terribleness of the movie, too.