“Midday Black Midnight Blue” is an impressionistic collage in shades of grief.

Non-linear in its storytelling, stingy with its facts, details and “truth,” it’s a picture that violates a lot of the basic covenants between filmmaker and audience.

It’s more obscurant than obscure, grudging in the way it gets around to whatever its point is. It reaches for “feelings” as opposed to revealing clear, concise characters, motivations and events generated by all that clarity.

Simple character names and the nature of relationships are guarded like the crown jewels, giving us little to grab hold of. The dialogue is mumbled so often that this adds another layer of “What the hell are they on about?” to the viewing experience.

But that’s…well, one way to do it, I suppose.

Ian (Chris Stack) is a guy with no visible means of support, living in a seaside cabin somewhere in the vicinity of Seattle. Not that ANY of this is made clear early or even well into the picture.

What is clear is that he had a great love (Samantha Soule, who co-wrote/co-directed this) and she’s gone. We saw her wade into the sea and not come up. But she’s not gone to Ian.

He’s cohabitating with her in this designer cabin, reliving their love affair, their fights, the ugly way it ended or didn’t really end.

“I’m pregnant. I wish it was yours.”

Ian has been trapped in this loop for some time — years, we gather. His city-living brother (McCaleb Burnett) may be underwriting this lifestyle. But when he and his partner (Lovell Holder) come visit, it’s out of concern and support.

“Hemingway wasn’t a hero at the end of his life,” partner-Carter warns as they leave.

“Liv,” as we eventually figure out her name was, had a troubled relationship with her father and a tight bond with her sisters, one of whom (Merritt Wever of “Nurse Jackie”) still lives in their little corner of the coast, running the local bar. Beth is also concerned about Ian.

Pay attention to Beth. She’s the one with answers and a grasp of objective reality.

Any number of things can trigger weepy memories for Ian — a song, a section of beach, a time of day. Lots of things triggered Liv, too. She and her sisters and Ian all reference some never finished, never-explained joke/debate that the old man seems to have started about Great “Lakes” as opposed to the ocean, with “no whale” ever showing up where Liv grew up, in Michigan, despite arguments to the contrary.

That label “film festival movie” suits “Midday Black Midnight Blue” to a T. Vague, somber, reflective and internalized can pass for “deep” in the rarefied world of a film festival.

But out here in Reality, at some point, we need to know who is whom. Identifying characters by name the first or second or third time we see them is kind of basic screenwriting.

What “really” happened or is happening should be clearer than this. Delineating flashbacks and fantasy sequences from the fictive “present” is helpful.

But virtually all of that goes by the board when your actors don’t enunciate well enough catch what it is they’re saying. I streamed this, switched on “auto generate” closed-captions, and the program was as baffled as I was by these wannabe-Brandos.

Ian is literarily literate, passing on Virginia Woolf novels to Liv in his memory, referencing 1970s cinema, identifying a quote from Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.” Who the hell is this guy?

Liv is that train wreck you never get over. And?

It’s perfectly acceptable to tell a story that makes the viewer come to you rather than laying it all out for us. But one suspects all these efforts to understate, underexplain and underenunciate are meant to paper over a story that’s thin, a plot that’s illogical and the presence of a $250,000 sailboat in the final flashback that is no more than a prop and a pretty setting for yet another unrationalized piece of a magically-financed past or present that makes little to no sense.

Rating: unrated, violence, alcohol abuse, discussion of suicide, profanity

Cast: Chris Stack, Samantha Soule and Merritt Wever.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Samantha Soule and Daniel Talbott . A Good Deed Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:28