Slow moving and unmoving in the bargain, “The Parades” is a sentimental Japanese exercise in world building in the supernatural.

There’s a taste of “The Sixth Sense,” a hint of Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author” and a lot of Rod Serling’s “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” in this downbeat fantasy about purgatory and the unfinished business, the “regrets” of the dead.

Writer-director Michihito Fujii (“A Family” is his best-known credit) emphasizes tone over pace and creates a movie of gently challenging twists, wish fulfillment fantasy and characters and performances so flat that there’s little incentive to finish “Parades,” or stay awake through it as you do.

Masami Nagasawa, star of “Mother,” is Minako, a woman we meet in the middle of a beachside reverie. She is abruptly swallowed by the sea. A “tsumani” we figure.

But she wakes up and starts searching for her little boy, Ryo. We learn she’s a single mom. We figure out she is a TV reporter. We’ve guessed which earthquake and tsumani hit her.

And by noticing her immaculate outfit that somehow survived, unblemished, by the second or third rescue worker who ignores her pleas, people she cannot grab to get their attention, we’ve figured out she’s dead. She quicky reasons out that she’s not the only ghost wandering the ruins of this disaster’s aftermath.

It’s only when she flags down a van driven by Akira (Kentarô Sakaguchi) that Minako starts to piece things together. He drives her to a ruined amusement park, with a functioning bar and tiny bungalows for living space. It’s an emcampment of the undead, dead people with “regrets.”

There’s the filmmaker (Lily Franky) who failed to complete his final film, set against student protests in Okinawa during the Vietnam War. A yakuza (Ryûsei Yokohama) didn’t live long enough to inherit his father’s gang or make a life outside of it with his bride. The upbeat bar owner (Shinobu Terajima) sadly checks in on her many children, the pregnant daughter whom she hopes to see give birth, even if she’s not literally “alive” to savor it.

A banker (Tetsushi Tanaka) is cagier about his past. And the newcomer (Nana Mori) with a schoolgirl’s uniform and a slit wrist barely needs to tell us her story. We can guess.

Every so often, these ghosts join others in “parades” to recognize their plight.

Minako has a hard time fitting in, because these people are “lazy” and incurious — stuck in place, some of them for years and years. They’re not settling their “regrets,” not moving on, not that curious about “What’s on the other side.”

But the filmmaker Michael has thoughts of finishing his final film in the afterlife. Akira is taking extensive notes about their netherworld, hoping to pass them on to the living. Minako is just looking for answers, hoping to find her boy still alive and figure out a way to speak to him.

There is most definitely a movie in this material, even if it’s mostly recycled afterlife fantasies — a “Sixth Sense” without the scares or big twist, “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “Heart and Soul” without the humor, joy or heartbreak.

Scene after scene drags on past its usefulness. We “get” the tone, and yet are then subjected to 132 minutes immersed in that tone telling about 90 minutes worth of story.

Hell isn’t serenely dull films like “The Parades.” But I’ll bet purgatory is.

Rating: TV-MA, adult themes, suicide

Cast: Masami Nagasawa, Kentarô Sakaguchi, Ryûsei Yokohama, Nana Mori, Shinobu Terajima, Tetsushi Tanaka and Lily Franky.

Credits: Scripted and directed by  Michihito Fujii. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:12