“Rest in Peace” is a sturdy Argentian thriller with too many soap operatic touches and twists for its own good.

It’s a tale of escaping a messy life through a horrific but all-too-convenient historical event, the bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994.

Novelist Martin Baintrub took that tragedy and imagined someone who used it to get away from ruinous debts and threats against his family. Director Sebastián Borenztein and co-screenwriter Marcos Osorio Vidal got a watchable if sometimes eyerolling, predictable and generally melodramatic movie out of that narrative.

Sergio (Joaquín Furriel of “Intuition”) is a Buenos Aires businessman who inherited the family factory but is struggling to keep it afloat, a fact that he keeps from his dental hygeinist wife, Estela (Griselda Siciliani, who was in “Bardo”).

He can’t have it burden his daughter Flor’s bat mitzvah, because her whole speech at the gathering is about how “He will make all my wishes come true” (in Spanish, or dubbed into English). He can’t let his worries color his little boy Matias’s opinion on his dad.

But the minute he says “Dad’ll always be there with you” to the boy, we know he won’t. It’s that kind of movie.

The celebration is marred by the presence of a collector from that one money lender Sergio cannot put off. Bruno (Gabriel Gioty) is impatient enough to tell him, when they meet again, that he wants “it all by Monday.”

Sergio has barely had a chance to bring Estela up to speed, beg a friend to buy their “country place” from him and fend-off an irate brother-in-law’s ugly accusations at a family dinner when that fateful day arrives.

And then a bomb goes off.

The narrative shifts back and forth between Estela’s concerned, then upset if-not-quite-frantic realization that her husband might have been in that blast. Authorities find his briefcase and the daughter’s new necklace which doting dad had just had repaired. She weeps.

But Sergio, his head ringing in the hospital, has survived. It’s just that as he gathers his senses, takes in the chaos and the scale of what he just lived through and he can’t complete that call “home.”

He runs away, making his way to Paraguay, South America’s version of “a place that doesn’t check ID that carefully.”

Sergio’s new life, working for an importer/trading firm of some sort, just requires that he make excuses any time he’s ordered to deal “with Argentines” or deliver something to another country.

Luckily, the boss’s wife (Lali Gonzálezi) is a fan. And when she’s suddenly widowed…

The tale is told with every moment of forshadowing underlined to ensure we notice it. The license of the driver on that taxi ride to the bus station to flee town is the perfect identity to steal. That heart-to-heart with his son in the bathroom at a big party is too good not to reprise, ironically, in the third act.

The performances are more adequate than compelling. Truth be told, I checked out of the picture at the moment where “seventeen years pass” and we see Sergio in a Robinson Crusoe beard and mop top, as if he hasn’t shaved in decades.

The time to acquire a permanent disguise might be the days and weeks after you make your escape and authorities might be looking for you.

Melodramatic touches — coindidences, old longings — pile up, so that by the finale, that’s pretty much all there is to “Rest in Peace,” a tale too self-consciously “dramatic” to feel “real,” too dramatically-pat to be all that entertaining.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Joaquín Furriel, Griselda Siciliani, Lali González and Gabriel Goity

Credits: Directed by Sebastián Borenztein, scripted by Marcos Osorio Vidal and Sebastián Borenztein, based on a novel by Martin Baintrub. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47