There’s usually a “took me right out of the movie” moment in a thriller that might have worked, but doesn’t. And there are a few of those in the Scottish tale of an abusive father and his three vengeful sons bent on “Betrayal.”

Their mother has recently died, and John, Henry and Vince the youngest (Brian Vernel, Daniel Portman and Calum Ross) find themselves in the woods, stalking deer with their dad.

Strange way to pay tribute to dead mum. But when a couple of sons fail to take a shot at a buck they spy in the trees, we and their bullying dad (Paul Higgins, perfectly loathesome) figure it out.

The deer is tied to a tree. There’s a grave already shoveled out, with shovels under the leaves to finish the job. When one brother finally takes the shot — at Dad — the game is up. They’ve shot the tyrant, avenging their long-suffering mother.

“We all did it. All of us.“

As a reward, there’s “a key” to the old man’s safe. But paranoia in this sort of conspiracy is a given. Even siblings who’ve conspired to kill “an animal” together are bound to mistrust one another.

And the kid, Vince? He is pretty obviously the weakest link, “Dad’s favorite” and all. Can Vince keep their secret, keep from giving away the careful plans they made and carried out?

We’ve seen their grave prep, and the way they shut off the motor on their father’s Range Rover and pushed it back to its parking place. What we didn’t see, for obvious reasons, is how they caught and tied up a huge buck.

Then there’s the matter of that “key.” Of all the ways to put that key in that shallow grave with their father’s body, writer-director Rodger Griffiths summons up the stupidest.

And while flashbacks explain their conspiracy and set up the troubling alliances within the alliance, and unravel some motivations, Griffiths, who adapted his short film “Take the Shot” for this, stumbles into a couple of other plot holes along the way.

Because while we know, from the moment he goes in the ground, that the father isn’t dead and that they’ll be digging that grave up to discover that somehow he has survived. Or that something other worldly took-over for him.

Those animal carcasses and random shots they experience in the woods? They might be from that just-wounded father, from one of the brothers or an accomplice, or from a phantom.

The sibling dynamic that Portman, playing the most “like Dad” of the three brothers, Vernel and Ross act-out are engrossing and properly chilling.

The flashbacks are well-conceived and executed, and the complications — Do other hunters they meet “know?” — may be pro forma but at least pass the “logical” smell test.

Even serving up a finale we see coming an hour before it arrives is forgivable, or at least as tolerable as the sometimes indecipherable Scots accents and the “Is it supernatural horror or a simple thriller?” indecision.

But those other stumbles early on seal the fate of this “Betrayal,” a thriller with simple primal plot undone by a leaky script and a loss of nerve.

Rating: R, graphic violence

Cast: Brian Vernel, Daniel Portman, Calum Ross and Paul Higgins, with Anita Vitesse James Harkness and Joanne Thomson

Credits:Directed by Rodger Griffiths, scripted by Rodger Griffiths and Robert Drummond. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:31