“The Christmas Ring” is a new romance novel adaptation starring “One Tree Hill” alumna Jana Kramer and Benjamin Hollingsworth of the aptly-titled Netflix series “Virgin River.”

It’s a slow, bloodless romance built on “anticipation” because there’s no conflict, little drama or romance and even less mystery about it. Readers and viewers of the genre are meant to buy into the magic of that “first kiss,” and anything that delays that — not matter how cloying or obvious — is part of the charm.

Whatever the merits of the novel, as movie material this script anticipates how early AI will take over production of such writing and screenwriting. It’s so rigidly formulaic as to feel contrived by a machine.

There are musical montages showing people decorating, college coeds baking and adults and kids gingerbread house making, all set to holiday tunes, some sung by Sinatra or Andy Williams.

The virtue signalling begins with the fact that our two leads fated to fall for one another are widowed. None of that messy “divorce” business that creates the vast majority of over-30 singles. She is a regular Bible reader. His elderly father quotes scripture and keeps an oddly acquisitive quote from St. Matthew on his lips, and on a sampler framed on the wall of his shop.

“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Virtue signalling in faith-based romance novels can also come camo-colored. One’s an Army Airborne widow. And hr daughter is dating a member of the 101st Airborne about to deploy.

Our leading lady has two besties, one Black and one white.

The plot gimmick is a lost family heirloom, a ruby and diamonds gold ring “found” by our heroine’s great grandfather when — you guessed it — he parachuted into Normandy in 1944.

And the “ticking clock” of it all is a Big Christmas Dance where everything and anything could be resolved in the finale. Will we have to wait until then for True Love’s First Kiss?

Kramer is Vanessa, who lost the aforementioned ring “in the Colorado snow” and figures hunting around Columbus and Marietta, Georgia antiques stores is the way to find it.

Hollingsworth is Ben, who helps run his father’s antiques shop and is there when she comes in poking about for the heirloom with a story behind it. He hears the story and drinks in the woman telling it, and is smitten.

His dad, the shop owner, doesn’t pay attention to the story. He’s played by Kelsey Grammer, who watched and listened to his fellow enunciator extraordinaire David Ogden Stiers’ affected Southern drawl in “Doc Hollywood” and decided to “Foghorn Leghorn it.”

As Vanessa’s daughter (Megan Ashley Brown) rushes home to see her about-to-deployer Ranger, there’s just never a right moment to spring the news to her that she’s met Prince Charming. The script’s lone laugh is this.

“What would you think if I started seeing someone?”

“Like, a therapist?”

There’s a sketchy obsessive (David Considine) determined to track down Vanessa’s ring and collect the reward she’s offered. Will he help or hinder her search for the ring and a true love to wear it for? Will daughter Sadie’s beloved be harmed when he’s sent in harm’s way?

The performances are understated to the point of bland.

Most films that earn the pejorative “Hallmark movie” label share one overriding characteristic. All the rough edges of life, the world the characters inhabit, their livelihoods and challenges, have been rubbed off. “The Christmas Ring” is pabulum that lives by the “Home on the Range” rule, a world “where never is heard a discouraging word.”

So it comes as no surprise that the most famous holiday schmaltz factory for chaste romances — not Netflix, the newer contender, but The Hallmark Channel — already produced a picture titled “The Christmas Ring” five years ago.

But this one is by Karen Kingsbury and coming to a theater near you.

Rating: PG

Cast: Jana Kramer, Benjamin Hollingsworth, Kelsey Grammer, Megan Ashley Brown, Debbie Winans, Jessie James Decker and David Considine.

Credits: Directed by Tyler Russell, scriptedd by Karen Kingsbury and Tyler Russell, based on Kingsbury’s novel. A Fathom Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:43