You’ve just learned your husband is leaving you for a younger woman — so you duct-tape him to a toilet and try to make him fall back in love with you.
That’s the incredible premise of “Serious Moonlight,” a shrill farce that strains credibility even by the standards of black comedy.
And that’s the least of the problems with this film based on a problematic script by murdered filmmaker Adrienne Shelley (“Waitress”), which never should have seen the light of day.
POPWRAP: Meg Ryan needs to face the music
The aggrieved wife — a lawyer, no less — is played by frozen-faced Meg Ryan, whom you would think would have learned the folly of her playing cuckolded spouses after “The Women.” (Those less versed in tabloid gossip should see Crowe, Russell.)
Absolutely nothing in the script or her performance indicates why Ryan would want to earn back the love of her husband, a creep charmlessly played by Timothy Hutton.
Most of the film takes place in the country home of the participants, and debuting director Cheryl Hines makes what is essentially a two-hander seem very much like an especially poor off-Broadway play.
Hines, best known as an actress in “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” seems to have directed the actors to shout most of their lines, much like her TV husband, Larry David.
Also briefly seen are Kristen Bell as the clueless girlfriend who hopes to leave for Paris with Hutton in the morning, and Justin Long as a gardener whose motives are apparent to the audience long before they are to Hutton.
“Serious Moonlight” conforms to the rule that bad movies tend to inadvertently announce their badness in dialogue.
“I’m so embarrassed for you,” Hutton tells Ryan at one point. “It’s just so not working.”