Within the first 10 minutes of The Beautiful Somewhere, one character has aimed a gun at his own head, while another has purposefully scraped her cranium with a power drill. Clearly, and in true CanCon fashion, these are damaged souls in search of an end to their miseries.

We in the audience can identify. The Beautiful Somewhere solemnly tries our patience from the first scene, wherein the eternally unshaven Roy Dupuis, playing a Northern Ontario cop by the unlikely name of Conk, falls into a portentous, Ted Striker-ish reverie in his car. Clearly, he's got demons in need of exorcising. Quicker than you can say “plot point,” he's sent off to investigate the preserved corpse that's surfaced in the local bog. It's a discovery that necessitates the arrival of a Toronto-based bog specialist, Catherine (Jane McGregor), who's a whiz at prodding fossilized folks but not much of a conversationalist – her pinched demeanour belies her terrible physical frailty.

Catherine needs to heal her body; Conk needs to heal his soul. The bog on which they've converged is rumoured to have healing properties. How convenient and hypothetically resonant! Neophyte hyphenate Robert Budreau's parallel-ridden screenplay is a rigid contraption, hitting all the forensic-procedural marks in order before skimming indigenous mysticism to minimal effect. He's only slightly more promising behind the camera: a few lovely exteriors don't excuse the clumsily staged dialogue scenes.