“A Sacrifice” is a thriller about an American father who is the last to realize that his daughter’s being recruited by a German cult.

As Ben Monroe is an expert on “groupthink” and cult behavior, this is humbling. He’s the one who invited Mazzy (Sadie Sink of “Stranger Things”) to Germany — where he’s teaching — to “get her grades up,” which suggests flawed reasoning backed up by inattentive parenting.

Who figures bringing a sixteen year-old to cosmopolitan, hedonistic Berlin, where she doesn’t speak the language and where he is too distracted by his work, is going to help her “grades?”

Logic isn’t the strong suit this latest thriller from Ridley Scott’s writer-director daughter Jordan Scott (“Cracked”), a picture that broods and occasionally chills and takes its time entrapping the daughter right up to the abrupt twists of the finale. It’s short but not “brisk,” and not really developed enough or long enough to score its points.

Ben’s academic friend since his college days (Stephan Kampwirth) has police connections, which is how he gets Ben onto the scene of a mass suicide. The author of “The Science of Loneliness” is working on a new book on “Groupthink” and seeing all the bodies, ritualistically staged pre-death, and hearing the theories of the police profiler (Sylvia Hoeks of “Blade Runner 2049”) could help him with his research.

They banter about what people get from cults — “community, believing” in something greater than themselves, causing one to “give away your free will” in an effort to give “you life some meaning.”

This is an “off the radar” cult, and will require all the profiler’s skill, with maybe some help from an author whose work she respects, to chase down.

That’s the perfect time for Mazzy to show up, forced to make her way from the airport on her own, unable to figure out the subway and its long, tortured Germanic station names. It’s a good thing helpful hunk Martin (Jonas Dassler) is there to show her the way.

Ben may be absorbed by the sort of thinking that leads to “groupthink,” and having someone to discuss that with. Mazzy checks out the profiler and wonders “Who’s the midlife-crisis bait?”

We can guess most of what’s to come just in that first act set-up. So Scott, adapting a novel by Nicholas Hogg, tries to throw us off the obvious by shifting the point of view to show us Martin’s life — living with his doting grandmother — and the cult he’s in, where everyone takes the reassurances of leader Hilma (Sophie Rois), that “you’ll never be lonely again” at face value even as she’s warning of global collapse, mass extinctions and — RED FLAG time — “chemtrails.”

The ticking clock here is watching Mazzy get lured into a cult while her father is distracted by researching a cult with the cute cop on the case.

Scott pretty much botches that, with the shifting points of view never building the necessary suspense to make this come off. She succeeds in serving up Jonestown chills at what gullible people, from the People’s Temple to Heaven’s Gate to MAGA Q-Anon devotees, can be talked into doing as they take the wrong advice on fighting loneliness.

Connecting that condition to totalitarianism is as close as “A Sacrifice” gets to sending a message.

The story is reasonably absorbing, and the leads compelling enough to make us invest in “A Sacrifice.” But the lapses in logic are thrown into sharp relief in a third act that pretty much collapses in on itself.

The Big Confrontation and Race to Save are utterly botched, which Scott doubles down on by then OVER-explaining what we’ve seen set up in the first two acts.

The reason one always points out “nepo babies” in showbiz is that “talent” isn’t heriditary, even if the urge to give your offspring a leg or two up in your profession is. Scott’s filmmaking isn’t anything that makes her stand out from legions of other filmmakers trying to get their movies made, and her competence is easily questioned in the execution here, no matter how much fatherly advice her producer-dad gave her, if any.

language, sometimes she does, mostly she can’t even pronounce the place names.

Rating: R, violence, disturbing images

Cast: Eric Bana, Sadie Sink, Jonas Dassler and Sylvia Hoeks

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jordan Scott, based on a novel by Nicholas Hogg. A Vertical release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:36