Today’s “Around the World with Netflix” film comes from Lebanon, a nation no stranger to strife and conflict like most of the Middle Eastern nation states surrounding her.

Lebanon isn’t mentioned by name or treated directly as the subject of this Arabic language (or dubbed into English) child’s fantasy of endless war and escape. But as schoolkids sing “They say my country is beaautiful, and besieged by anger” that fits Lebanon better than any most any place on Earth.

A family of four has found itself stranded on a tiny spit of a Meditteranean island, with only a lighthouse, reeds, rocky beaches and the sea around them.

We gather that they were en route somewhere when they landed here. They have a radio that picks up Greek news, and that can be used to call for help at night when the signal carries farther. They can crank up the generator that runs the perhaps-abandoned light. They do this as a service to others, “so those who are lost can find their way in the dark,” father Nabil (Ziad Bakri) tells his little girl Jana (Riman Al Rafeea).

Mother Yasmine (Nadine Pabaki) frets over the “friends” they paid to pick them up from here. Every so often, they expect that rescue to arrive, and take their luggage to the currents-swept edge of the sea.

Teenaged Adam (Zain Al Rafeea) impatiently gripes at their tiny rations and their plight, but finds some escape in the music on the radio.

Jana, whose voice is the first we hear, narrates and speaks of “the big blue monster” in the water. She cannot swim, so even a floating tarp has menace about it.

There isn’t much to do but forage, beach comb and try to hide their panic. Not Adam.

“We’re never getting out of here.”

First-time feature director Matty Brown, who co-wrote the script, dabbles in “Twilight Zone” and Theatre of the Absurd “plotting,” inciting incidents and the like. But he finds precious little to animate this blunt-edged metaphor in search of poignancy, universality and mystery.

The images can be lovely, but the cryptic clues in the story fail to surprise when they arrive or move when they’re “explained.”

And knowing how often Rod Serling & Co. delivered this sort of tale in thirty minutes, with commercials, over 60 years ago just makes the slack pacing and parsimoniously doled-out “message” a terrible drag.

Rating: TV-14, peril, images of war, profanity

Cast: Nadine Pabaki, Ziad Bakri, Riman Al Rafeea and Zain Al Rafeea

Credits: Directed by Matty Brown, scripted by Matty Brown, Hend Fakhroo and Yassmina Karajah. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37