What a maddening, convoluted and bizarrely complex comic thriller “I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me” is.

Maybe it’s the passive “hero,” the muddled morass this Mexican college student in Barcelona finds himself trapped in, the holes in the narrative that don’t satisfyingly take the tale from A-to-Z, but I found this as frustrating as any Spanish-language thriller or satire or darkly comic mystery I’ve seen.

Reading the Juan Pablo Villalobos source novel might help, as one suspects at least a couple of the reviewers endorsing the film might have as their rationale. But what’s on the screen is all that matters in a movie, and this plot has lots of holes, blundered motivations and in A-to-Z narrative terms, half a dozen letters in the alphabet are skipped.

Award winning director Fernando Frias (“I’m No Longer Here”) shows real amibition in tackling “No voy a pedirle a nadie que me crea.” But the leaden pacing, leaps in logic and long static passages where the plot doesn’t advance and the entertainment value flatlines overwhelm any New World vs Old World, Latin America vs. Spain satiric touches and (intended) dark laughs.

We meet JuanPa, aka Juan Pablo as a teen, sneaking off to watch grainy (and explicit) porn with his sketchy cousin Lorenzo and a pal, and committing the title of the porno — “I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me” — to memory.

A few years later, Guadalajara doctor’s son Juan Pablo (Dario Yazbek Bernal) has won a scholarship to study Latin American lit in Barcelona. He’s thrilled that girlfriend Valentina (Natalia Solián) can come along.

But his going away party is interrupted by an insistent call from Lorenzo (Darío Rocas), who has a new hustle going and a “project” he wants to talk over, and it just won’t wait.

That’s when Juan Pablo finds himself kidnapped from a store, stuffed into a van and hustled into the garage where Lorenzo is bound and gagged. That’s when he gets a call from the menacing man who only goes by “The Lawyer.” And aspiring writer Juan Pablo witnesses his first murder when his fast-talking cousin is silenced for good.

For me, “I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me” starts to go wrong right here. Juan Pablo’s passive reaction to this horror is what I don’t believe. His refusal to tell anyone — parents, girlfriend or police — about this isn’t rational, even considering the shock and the expectation that every cop in Mexico is dirty.

Add to that his presence of mind to try and protect Valentina and you’ve lapsed into melodrama. Juan Pablo is hustled off the plane by a dirty cop so that the The Lawyer can call him, make him make up with the dumped-to-save-her-from-this “Vale” so that they can both participate in this Barcelona “project,” threatening Juan Pablo’s parents and Vale in the process.

The film needs a performance and editing that let us see wheels turning, panic, shock, scheming, all of which young Bernal fails to get across.

“The Project” demands absolute obedience, changing the focus of his academic research and his advisor, plopping the Mexican lad who breaks out with excema under stress as the only male in the middle of a lesbian-dominated feminist “Gender Studies” curriculum, forced to fake his way to expertise in it to approach a coed (Anna Castillo) The Lawyer has targeted for courting and seduction.

The central thread of the plot, that “Project,” is forgotten for long stretches as we see the toll this “secret” is taking on Valentina, whom Juan Pablo mistreats and ignores and throws over, a lengthy detour that probably works much better in print than on the screen. We dive into her entire life outside of Juan Pablo, long phone chats with her sister, losing herself in alcohol, hit on by their landlord, lured into a threesome.

The screenplay has a “page by page” literalness than makes one feel that Frias didn’t dare thin this book out for the screen. There’s a lot of trimmable fat in this screenplay. A clumsy framing device — the manuscript of Juan Pablo’s dissertation/”novel”/confession is discarded, found by a Barcelona bum, read and tossed back in the trash — is joined by too many other detours and static scenes that tend to ruin the curiosity and supposedly building suspense that would keep the viewer engaged.

The Lawyer (Alexis Ayala) makes a fine villain, but his henchmen of various ethnicities are colorless characters. And we hear entirely too much from the landlord (Juan Minujín), from “The Italian” homeless guy Vale befriends, from a veterinarian who has a one scene “joke” not worth repeating, and others.

Juan Pablo’s mother’s prattling on phone calls, the gender studies debates, Vale’s gauche descent into peeing-in-the-street alcoholism give away that this is all supposed to be darkly funny. But Bernal — half brother to Gael Garcia Bernal — is inexpressive and itchy and above all else “passive” as he narrates/types his dissertation and takes every affront, blow and crime committed against him or which he is forced to commit with a poker-faced blandness. That drains the character of any interest he might generate.

There’s a satiric thriller that works in here somewhere. But even allowing for cultural shadings that don’t tranlate easily, the “thriller” part is so watered-down in this plot that “I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe This” becomes all too believably cumbersome and dull.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse, explicit pornographic sex, profanity

Cast: Dario Yazbek Bernal, Natalia Solián, Anna Castillo, Darío Rocas and
Alexis Ayala.

Credits: Directed by Fernando Frias, scripted by Maria Camila Arias and Fernando Frias, based on a novel by Juan Pablo Villalobos. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:58