Grade: D-

The first directorial effort from Stephen Gaghan, who won an Oscar for writing “Traffic,” has a title that’s clearly intended to be Dantesque; it includes periodic references to the “Inferno,” and at one point, in a red herring that goes nowhere, there’s a scribbled reference to a library call number that turns out to belong to a volume bearing that very title. And, of course, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” is what the sign over the gates of hell reads in the Italian master’s “Divine Comedy.” Unhappily, those words prove far more appropriate than Gaghan could have wished. They wouldn’t be out of place over the doors of any auditorium where “Abandon” is screening. Viewers are properly forewarned.

In this teeny-bopper, would-be psychological thriller, Katie (Katie Holmes), an incredibly bright, svelte but stressed-out college senior, is haunted by the memory of her wealthy, golden-boy boyfriend Embry Larkin (Charlie Hunnam), who went unaccountably missing two years earlier just shy of graduation. To make matters worse, a police detective named Wade Handler (Benjamin Bratt), a recovering alcoholic (isn’t everyone troubled?), shows up to investigate Embry’s disappearance–the family lawyers want him declared deceased for inheritance purposes. Of course, all sorts of spooky things start happening–Katie begins seeing Embry stalking her and having flashbacks to her childhood, when her father left her stranded in the middle of what looks to be an arctic wasteland–and a terrible secret is eventually revealed. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise. In the meantime, Katie wins a highly-competitive job search with a big consulting firm and gets involved with Wade.

In truth, Gaghan’s script barely has enough content to fill the confines of a one-hour TV episode, and so in directing it he has to stage everything with agonizing slowness, desperately trying to infuse sequences with a menace that nonetheless utterly eludes him. Most of the running-time seems devoted to following various people–especially Ms. Holmes–wandering around darkened hallways and deserted library stacks, fearfully awaiting noises or quick movements that will give them a start.

These drearily repetitive episodes are punctuated by desultory conversations between Katie and Wade, irritating sequences featuring the heroine’s annoying chums (Zooey Deschanel, Gabrielle Union, Gabriel Mann and Will McCormack, all very poorly used), and totally unnecessary interludes in which Katie confers with a school counselor (Tony Goldwyn) who–like every male within a hundred-mile radius, it seems–eventually tries to hit on her. There’s also a creepy coed called Mousy Julie (Melanie Linskey) who pops up out of the darkness periodically to provide a cheap shock without consequences. As if all this weren’t bad enough, in the final twenty minutes Gaghan resorts to a series of chronology-switching shifts, bizarre flashbacks and even stranger flash-forwards that add incoherence to the prevailing sluggishness. When the credits spring on the screen, after one last silly effort to elicit a gasp, the audience is likely to emit a collective “Huh?”

The acting is terrible, but Gaghan’s helming makes it seem even worse than it is. Holmes proves a pallid lead in any event, but the director’s habit of focusing on her derriere (one of her first scenes even includes dialogue referring to it) is gratuitous and embarrassing. As for Bratt, he’d better be careful: if het keeps appearing in clunkers like this, his departure from “Law and Order” to pursue a career in features may come to resemble David Caruso’s mistake in ankling “NYPD Blue.” (Who knows, ten years from now he might become the star of “CSI Boise.”) Hunnam looks to have a certain Heath Ledger brand of scraggly blond charisma to him, but only better vehicles will demonstrate whether it proves authentic. Fred Ward is relegated to a cameo as Wade’s predictably supportive boss, and Goldwyn’s part is a throwaway, probably a one-day shoot. Technically the picture is slick enough, but all the contributions–from Matthew Libatique’s cinematography to Clint Mansell’s music–come across as generic

The upshot of all this is that in the hapless “Abandon,” the prize-winning “Traffic” scribe has fashioned a cinematic car wreck–though it amounts to a slow-speed crash, to be sure. In this case, you should definitely let Dante’s gloomy words be your guide.