“Unfriending” is a deadpan Canadian comedy with “film festival darling” engrained in its DNA. It doesn’t quite come off, but being dark and droll, it might play to the right audience, a forgiving film fest crowd willing to ignore how slowly it starts, how low the ceilings are for the performances and how quickly it bogs down before The Big Finish.

It’s from The Butler Brothers, Brett and Jason, whose specialty is film festival movies such as “Confusions of an Unmarried Couple” and “Mourning has Broken.”

Blake and May (Sean Melrum and Simone Jetsun) are hosts for a dinner party, taking care to get the potroast just right, to make the table settings perfect and get their lovely two-story frame house ready for company, and to sneak their box wine into pricier empty bottles their more pretentious friends will lap up.

So what if blowhard Blake pours red wine into bottles that plainly say “blanc” on the label?

“I’m not bilingual! You can’t judge me!”

Mutual friends Radia and Barclay (Jenna Vittoria and Michael Pearson), models of political correctness, and former punk rocker Darby (Honor Spencer) and her lover Giselle (Rachelle Lauzon) all show up early for the “adult sleepover” in the country, most of them well-prepared for the occasion.

But being 30ish, this isn’t Blake and May’s house. It belongs to his parents. He’s a tad too prickly and myopic to have ever been a success at everything.

It isn’t just a “dinner party,” with “good friends, good wine and good conversation.” It’s an “intervention.” And it isn’t an ordinary intervention, either. They’re here to convince their awkward, introverted and suffering friend Isaac (Alex Stone) to kill himself.

It’s a pot-luck for suicide, with some friends bringing suggestions, and Blake contributing several possible means of Isaac’s self-administered demise — a rope, a switchblade, a pistol that was “John Wick’s” mass murder weapon of choice in the movies, pills, a hair dryer for dropping in the tub, a list of local bridges worth jumping from and, in the garage, “my 1999 RAV 4.”

Carbon monoxide? Good to keep your options open. And be thorough.

They do whisky shots and rehearse, with PC policeman Barclay correcting everything.

“I don’t think we can say ‘guest room’ here. Vintage things (Barclay shows up with a trunk, not a suitcase) are cool, vintage thoughts are not.”

And just as everybody save for the failed punk rocker have signed on for the evening’s activities, sad sack Isaac arrives, with a smart, assertive Black woman, Lexxi (Golden Madison) as his date.

Wait, what? Isaac doesn’t date! Might this change everything they think about him? Or does it merely “complicate” the best laid plans of May and especially Blake?

There are a few promising directions the Butlers could have taken this story, but the twists they toss at us are barely able to keep this short, dark comedy in motion.

A couple of the performances have enough charismatic pop to come off, but the dialogue and characters they play aren’t enough to push “sit-com bit players” out of one’s mind.

The whole “circle of care for our friend” selling point doesn’t make the sale.

By the time the narrative rallies for an over-the-top finale, the deadpan has drained most of the energy out of it and “Unfriending” simply lurches over the finish line when it should sprint.

But in the right film festival with the right audience…

Rating: unrated, violence, sexual situations, profanity

Cast:Sean Melrum, Simone Jetsun, Jenna Vittoria, Michael Pearson, Honor Spencer, Rachelle Lauzon, Golden Madison and Alex Stone.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Brett M. Butler and Jason G, Butler. A Tiny Cabin release.

Running time: 1:27