There will, presumably, come a time when Netflix stops shelling out hordes of money for the dumbest pieces of filmmaking imaginable. Unfortunately for us, 2019 is not that time. For this week’s Deep Cut, I put myself through the painful, nay, torturous experience of a movie called “Mute.”

“Mute” is a science fiction movie set in a futuristic dystopian Germany. This is why when I saw Paul Rudd, with a mustache the size of an adult squirrel on his face featured as the film’s thumbnail image, I pressed play without hesitation. That, my friends, was a mistake.

If you asked me to tell you the entire plot of this movie, I would have a really hard time doing so. So, I’ll tell you the basic setup. Basically, the main character is a guy named Leo played by Alexander Skarsgard (best known for being the world’s biggest a–hole in “Big Little Lies” and a very hot man in the live-action “Tarzan”), who is a kind-hearted, mute Amish man living in a fully teched-out future Berlin. Leo is weirdly obsessed with water because he was rendered mute in a freak boating accident and his family didn’t allow him to get surgery because they’re Amish, which he’s pretty much fine with, except that he has some PTSD around water and drowning.

Leo has a hot, blue-haired girlfriend named Naadirah, who he loves very much despite the fact that she has no personality traits other than being hot. Naadirah goes missing, and Leo takes it upon himself to find her. Meanwhile, Rudd’s character, Cactus, who is a very mean American dude that has a young daughter, works both as a surgeon and as a torturer for some prostitution syndicate which is tenuously associated with Naadirah. He does this with his best friend, Duck (Justin Theroux—I know, the cast of this movie is wacky). Cactus is trying to get out of Berlin because he hates looking and acting really gross all the time and misses the ol’ U. S. of A. Also, for some reason, he and his daughter aren’t in “the system,” a thing that I suppose is important based on how frequently Cactus brings it up but not because they actually explain what the system is.

Then some stuff unfolds, which I really want to spoil, but I won’t in case some of you like to watch bad sci-fi. I, myself, have fun watching them from time to time. Honestly, though, a lot of the twists in this movie are both bad and very intense, so I wouldn’t necessarily recommend watching it for a fun, light movie night. The intense stuff isn’t well done, though, so I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe don’t watch it at all.

Most of “Mute” is very bad. Basically, this movie has one thing going for it, and that is mildly cool lighting. There’s a nice blue motif throughout the film and a cool color palette because of Leo’s whole water thing, which comes back around at the end of the movie in a predictable way and so on and so forth. Most of the relationships in this movie besides maybe two are confusing and dubious; I spent more time trying to figure out the characters’ relationships than what was going on in the actual plot itself. Yes, I know, sci-fi is often ambiguous on the character and relationship stuff in order to focus more on the robot-y dystopia of it all, but this movie purports from the very beginning to be fairly relationship-centric. Screen time is primarily spent showing people inside of normal-looking rooms and talking to each other about other people, rather than establishing the film’s complex and, honestly, kind of cool futuristic world.

Also, the film was laughably sexist and had a pedophile featured as one of the main characters. Said pedophile, Cactus’s friend Duck, was not even the main antagonist. Instead, we were supposed to see Cactus as the main antagonist but, like, WHAT?! I’m not going to hate anyone in this movie more than, oh, I don’t know, the freaking pedophile?! Final verdict: this movie is very boring and otherwise messed up.