Leon talks a good game.

He’s come to the summer house of a friend, in the forest set back from the sea, to “work.” He has “a manuscript” and a “deadline.”

The friend — Felix — wants to dash off for a swim, fix a leaking roof on his mother’s cottage, socialize. He too has a “deadline,” a photography portfolio to finish for an art school application.

But Leon is the one who says “work” all the time. “I need to work alone.” “I have to go. Work.”

Noises — from the woods, planes and helicopters overhead, the other woman staying in this house in the words having sex — distract and alarm him. He’s always dozing off and rarely really zeroing in on the task at hand. What’s up with that?

At least his intense focus on the “work” that he’s not really doing, the deadline he’s probably going to miss, keeps his head down. All around him, people are recreating, chatting, enjoying their time off as if they also have limited time.

A cataclysm is coming. Those planes and helicopters? They’re hauling water. Just down the way, the forest is “Afire” and getting closer all the time.

The latest from writer-director Christian Petzold– “Undine” and “Phoenix” were his — isn’t a disaster movie. It’s another character study in Germanic stereotypes and a romance that never quite becomes romantic.

He has Felix (Landston Uibel) drag his friend Leon (Thomas Schubert) away for a long weekend at his mother’s hutte by the sea. And once there, Felix and we wonder why in the hell he would bother.

Leon is pedantic, sullen, dull and humorless, an all “work” wet blanket. Even the fetching young “seasonal worker” (Paula Beer) also staying at Felix’s mother’s place can’t drag him out of his funk.

Leon won’t go swimming. He’s constantly trying to get Felix on task — either finishing his portfolio, getting the Mercedes that broke down on the way fixed, or fetching groceries. He’s tactless to Nadja about her noisy love-making, and about her job. She can’t even bribe him into being human with an offer of a free ice cream cone from her resort town cart.

“I’m not a big fan of ice cream.”

As romance and hurt feelings and short tempers and increasingly alarming signs of the fire-to-come swirl around him, Leon will have to break out of his existential funk if he wants to survive and if he wants his “work” to be readable.

Schubert, an award-winning young Austrian actor, makes Leon on-the-spectrum unlikable pretty much start to finish. Leon’s self-seriousness crosses into insufferability. So there’s no sense confessing his love to the pretty woman he can’t have a conversation with without insulting her.

Uibel’s Felix is more carefree, open to experience and distraction. Uibel doesn’t have much to play in a light character with a casual disregard for deadlines and risk. Even though he never becomes a sweetness and light “type,” we never stop wondering why he brought this stick in the mud with him.

Beer, who played “Undine,” leans into guarded but beguiling here, a free spirit who keeps her secrets even as she’s reaching out to this hapless, tuned-out narcissist who seems to live his life by the rules and a discipline he professes but rarely practices.

“Afire” is a dry, downbeat character study for the first two acts and a film that turns to melodrama — the fire upon them — for the third.

It’s likeable and engrossing, with Petzold not shy about spending the time to let a wild card character, lifeguard Devid (Enno Trebs), tell an anecdotal joke that only a German would find funny, or to bring in Leon’s publisher/editor late in the story to sort of “explain” why Leon’s the way he is.

The film, titled “Roter Himmel” (Red Sky) in Germany, makes an intriguing journey from irritating to melancholy and sad thanks largely to an engaging cast and a filmmaker brave enough to bore and annoy us before belatedly getting to his point, which we’ve known it all along.

Rating: unrated, animal peril, nudity, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Thomas Schubert, Paula Beer, Langston Uibel, Enno Trebs and Matthias Brandt.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Christian Petzold. A Janus release.

Running time: 1:44