You’ve spent years writing and making short films, working your way towards that “feature writing and directing debut.” And then some smug critic comes along and dismisses it with a “The longer ‘Bone Cold’ goes on, the worse it gets.”

I feel your pain, writer-director Billy Hanson. Didn’t care for your movie, but there’s effort in it and an idea or three. Not really good ideas, not packaged together, but anyway.

“Bone Cold” is a low-urgency, slowfooted sniper thriller that morphs into a creature feature horrorshow with a suggestion of “PTSD” about it. The first act is passably rendered, although we’ve had lots of sniper movies and most of them were better than this. The second direction the story takes is confused and confusing, as we wonder if our triggerman is hallucinating, or if his comrade and others might share that spectral Nosferatu image he’s haunted by.

It begins with the dispassionate professionalism of a military shooter (Jonathan Stoddard) and his wiseass spotter (Matt Munroe) who figures his one-shot/no-waiting sniper is a “You only miss when you want to” guy.

But that’s in the desert of Afghanistan. And even then, CPO Jon Bryant thinks he sees his target standing after he knows he plugged him right in the head. Plainly something about the work he’s been doing gets to him, as it would most compassionate human beings.

That “Thank you for your service” business that Jon and Marco go through on every ride home in uniform only earns their mockery and Jon’s borderline contempt.

“That lady has no idea what she’s thanking us for.”

And then he’s yanked for another mission within a day or so of getting back to his wife (Jennifer Khloe) and daughter. It isn’t just the lack of decompession time that makes this job seem sketchier. An “agency” man is there at the briefing, which is off-base. The intel is limited — some anarchist trouble-maker out to prolong the (now) ongoing Russo-Ukraine hostilities.

They’ll be in the snow, in Russia proper and pretty much on their own. But when you’re a soldier you follow orders.

The mission goes wrong, and the things Jon sees and hears grow more alarming as their support team refuses to extract them until they kill the man they were sent to assasinate.

One thing I’m a stickler for in horror movies is actors giving the viewer something like a realistic reaction when something inexplicable, horrific and/or supernatural happens. Characters should have memories and trauma from what they’ve experienced, and the actors have to convey that, spilling over in every scene after the initial “This can’t be REAL” epiphany.

The director has to ensure that terror and energy carry over, take after take, shot after shot, scene after scene.

There’s little of that here. “Bone Cold” is a movie that feels perfunctory, laid-back when the characters and the viewer should be panicked, on tenterhooks and frantic to get out of a situation they’ve not been trained for.

Every careless “Somebody’s about to get shot/grabbed” moment is telegraphed, given away before the unsurprising surprise happens. Every dismissal of danger is worth an eye roll, every underreaction to wounds, seeing the impossible and getting your mind around it, undercuts the suspense and sense of jeopardy and punches a fresh hole in the film.

The later acts have more histrionics and even less believability. And the damned picture just won’t end, with attempted confrontations and explanations, high stakes moments that lose their nerve and a narrative that tries have it both ways as it wanders off the reservation.

Whatever promise the premise of stranding two snipers in the “Bone Cold” once had is frittered away as the longer this movie goes on, the worse every thing about it gets.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Jonathan Stoddard, Matt Munroe, Jennifer Khloe and Elise Greene.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Billy Hanson. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:48