That weary thriller trope “It was just a dream” gets utterly beaten to death in the moody, obscure and somewhat convoluted horror tale “Deliver Us.”

It’s a graphically violent a story set in Russia where a nun, claiming Catholic mythology’s second “immaculate conception,” is set to give birth to twin boys — one a “conduit for the light,” a Christ, the other “a conduit for The Beast,” the AntiChrist.

Co-writer, co-director and star Lee Roy Kunz (the less famous “Delirium”) bathes his movie in gloom, gore, and lots of “It was just a dream” fake-outs in this thoughtful but frustrating variation on a “Damien/The Omen” theme.

Yes, it’s a “Good v. Evil” “prophecy. And this time, that prophecy was written in tattoos on the backs of people ritualistically slaughtered and skinned in the film’s opening images.

Cardinal Russo ( Alexander Siddig of “Deep Space Nine,” “Gotham” and “Game of Thrones”) doesn’t tell the young priest, Father Fox (Kunz) what medium these images he’s so excited about were preserved on. But as he leads the fallen-but-not-“fallen” priest through the Medieval-looking picture glyphs, he enthuses “The prophecy might be real!”

Fox was summoned to a remote Russian convent to treat, minister to or exorcise a pregnant nun, Sister Yulia (Maria Vera Ratti of the recent “Leonardo” series), who swears she was impregnated by God and is about to birth two very special boys.

She tells him it was she who summoned the priest/exorcist from St. Petersburg, a man trying to “stop being a bad priest” and start being a “better man,” because “you are the only one who can keep the bad thing from happening.”

Father Fox has his own pregnancy issues. He’s in love, his industrialist-heiress girlfriend (Jaune Kimmel) is pregnant. And this is brushed over in the script as though the Vatican and the Russian Catholic hierarchy wouldn’t care or the viewer wouldn’t wonder, “OK, how the hell did that happen?”

But Father Fox is here, skeptical of anything he’s told is “divine” or “demonic” and maybe still wondering what those picture glyphs were written on which the cardinal didn’t want to discuss.

A sinister one-eyed priest (Thomas Kretschmann of “The Pianist,” just seen in “Gran Turismo”) is also on hand, not-so-secretly participating in rites that tell us he’s hellbent on keeping this birth from happening.

So of course the fallen priest, the pregnant nun and the cardinal go on the lam.

The moodiness of “Deliver Us” is undeniable, but I am hard-pressed to recall a thriller with less forward motion, pace or mounting suspense.

Ambling from the flat-footed getaway to an Estonian forest hide-out, with encounters with strangers who seem to go into shock at this sight of this new “Virgin Mother” and even try to kill themselves in her presence (dreams it seems), “Deliver Us” is in no rush to deliver anybody or anything.

We get a hint that the world is spinning into pre-ordained chaos outside of this “family” on the run bubbble, but only a hint.

Kunz more or less holds his own as an actor, and gives himself nude scenes because he’d rather we not be thinking about the holes in theology, Church doctrine, logic and common sense on display.

And almost every time something truly horrific or alarming happens, somebody wakes up as “dreams” here are how it/they/He”talks to us,” true-believer Yulia insists.

Between the many seriously underlit scenes and the rambling, somber and self-serious dialogue, I was at a loss, not about the point of this — to kill one or both of the babies and foil evil or stop a “Second Coming” and “End Times” — but about how this contrived, clunky narrative is going to get us there.

As Catholic horror tales goe, “Deliver Us” is more of a good-looking failure than a scary, thrilling or entertaining dive into Church arcana.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Lee Roy Kunz, Maria Vera Ratti, Alexander Siddig, Jaune Kimmel and Thomas Kretschmann

Credits: Directed by Lee Roy Kunz and  Cru Ennis, scripted by Lee Roy Kunz and Kane Kunz. A Magnet (Sept. 29) release.

Running time: 1:43