There are a lot of telltale signs that “Grieve,” a pretentious, cryptic and childishly obscurant title loosely labeled as “horror” and inexplicably picked up for distribution by Terror Films, might be a student film.

I try not to review student films, even those whose filmmakers are cheeky enough to get an off-off brand distributor to pick their movie up. They’re mostly bad, and I don’t grade on the curve. Which is a way of saying I can be pretty mean. Ask anybody.

Writer-director Robbie Smith hasn’t made anything else, near as one can tell.

His screenwriting betrays a certain in-his-own-headspace insensibility that opens with nearly three minutes of a character curled up on a floor, listening to what appears to be (the audio mix is poor) an old phone message while the screen is covered in large block letters “GRI” over “EVE.”

A prologue that is a pointless structural blunder (the “credits” come after it) sets up our grieving Sam (Paris Peterson) before he is sent home from the office and into his family’s cabin out in the snowy, overcast woods. Somewhere.

Sam is grieving for Sarah (Danielle Keaton), whom we finally glimpse in a flashback over 20 minutes into the nearly-dialogue-free opening act. And he reconnects with a childhood friend (Jacob Nichols) from cabin country, unhappily married, working class and ready to “party” with pills and what not.

Sam starts to hear voices. Sometimes, it’s his voice, narrating…something. Every now and then, he hears cryptic pronouncements whispered in French.

“Nothing festers in the cracks and expands…Nothing lives and grows.”

Yes, it’s as inane in English as it is in French.

By the time Sam sees a gnarled hand reach out of the ground, we wonder if he’s losing it, if he’s having pill flashbacks or he’s actually encountering something supernatural, apparently unrelated to his grief. By the time he has his first “accident” (self harm), we still haven’t figured out what exactly is going on here.

Helpfully, Smith provides an explanation for the plot on the film’s IMDb page. There’s little that he wrote there that actually jibes with the pseudo-artsy, choppy, indifferently-plotted movie we’ve seen on the screen. And “explaining” away your intentially obscure movie with a director’s statement is very “student film,” BTW.

The cast is neither accomplished nor interesting — mostly-unknown, with Keaton’s long career of bit parts apparently deemed unworthy of documenting on Wikipedia.

Obscure, clumsily-pretentious, under-scripted and flatly acted, there’s nothing to recommend here.

But if it’s a student film, there’s always the hope that things will click further along, maybe in grad school. Or not.

As it is, I can’t for the life of me figure out what any distributor saw in this, and even the publicist sending out pitches for this waste of time mis-titled “Grieve” “Grief” in bold block letters of her own.

Good grief.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse

Cast: Paris Peterson, Danielle Keaton and Jacob Nichols

Credits: Scripted and directed by Robbie Smith. A Terror Films release.

Running time: 1:05