There’s a moody, intimate and festival-darling short film tucked into the 105 minutes of “Esme, My Love.” But as a feature, this mild-mannered but atmospheric tale of slow-slower-slowest “rising” terror just doesn’t have enough going on to rope the viewer in.

A mother (Stacey Weckstein) drives her supposedly sickly daughter Esme (Audrey Grace Marshall) into the forest “for some fresh air.”

The child is confused and protesting this visit to the place “where we’re from,” mother Hannah’s childhood home out in the country. Mom seems troubled, distracted, with images flashing of a car accident or some other tragedy.

Is this “what happened,” or what might have happened or what might possibly happen? Hard to say.

Because director and co-writer Cory Choy has made his feature debut a film concerned with the mother-daughter dynamic, cryptic clues and a possibly idyllic/possibly-traumatic past, but not with answering questions.

Mom keeps talking about her sister, Emily. Emse looks just like her, but is annoyed with Mom’s “clingy” thing and can only be distracted by backpacking into the woods, nature, the tumbledown house they rummage through and the catamaran Mom won’t launch into the lake with her.

“You won’t be my little girl forever,” Mom tells her. True enough,” Hannah,” how Esme addresses her mother when she’s trying to get her attention. But what’s your point?

Hannah has reveries and nightmares, angelic visions and horrific forebodings.

“My past is connecting with us,” she insists. “The answers, they’re out there!”

“We have to DIG,” she also insists. So they do — in the house, around it, holes in the forest.

One can get a pretty good idea of what’s going on and what Choy and co-writer Laura Allen were going for. And the players can do their utmost to maintain the mystery while slowly ramping up the fear or sense of alarm the viewer is supposed to feel, and this still never amounts to more than a chilly shrug.

The tone is dark, the “jolts” mild and the resolution opaque, not clear enough to justify the 100 minutes that preceded it.

Rating: unrated, disturbing images

Cast: Audrey Grace Marshall, Stacey Weckstein.

Credits: Directed by Cory Choy, scripted by Laura Allen and Cory Choy. A Terror Films release.

Running time: 1:45