Hal Hartley has a track record of making exquisite films mixed among rafts of stupefyingly bad ones – and with his first ever sequel, Fay Grim, proves he's able to swing the pendulum just as clumsily even across characters that once worked well.

Resurrecting the least interesting relationship from 1997's Henry Fool – a brainy tease of a movie, the finest quality of which was its ambiguous ending – Hartley ruins the magic by jumping forward in time to catch us up on the troubled marriage of the eponymous Grim (Parker Posey) and Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan), and not without an uncomfortable bit of recapping first.

Through a barrage of intentionally frustrating dialogue, Fay Grim becomes a caricature of a Hartley movie rather than a sometimes-fun ride around the outskirts of pretentiousness. Within the impossible-to-connect-to plot of international chase and pseudo-sexy espionage (think magic shops and decoratively foreign tongues), it seems like Hartley's aiming to create a long, funny, erudite riddle here. But the aim is so far over the top that by the dizzying climactic sequence, Fay Grim has more the effect of artifice spun out of control.

Not that the first 40 minutes don't have their charms: the return of James Urbaniak as Simon Grim is welcome if underutilized, and Liam Aiken's performance as Fay and Henry's son Ned shows Hartley's still got the ability to cast haunting, nuanced actors whom you'd watch in almost anything – if only he wouldn't put them in such unfortunate movies.