Writer-director Savi Gabizon’s Canadian reworking of his 2017 film stars Gere as a man dealing with the death of a teenage son he never knew he had.

Savi Gabizon’s English-language remake of his 2017 Israeli drama starts out reasonably enough. Prosperous, middle-aged bachelor businessman Daniel (Richard Gere, who’s played this sort of role many times before) has a reunion in a restaurant with Rachel (Suzanne Clément), his Canadian former lover whom he hasn’t seen in twenty years. Daniel is understandably rattled to learn he has a 19-year-old son, Allen. When Rachel briefly leaves to use the restroom, he immediately attempts to contact his lawyer. Then he becomes even more rattled when she returns and informs him that Allen was recently killed in an accident in which his car plunged into a canal.

It’s an understandable reaction by a grieving father, even one who didn’t know his son. But as Daniel extends his stay to investigate further, he seems to become more and more obsessed. He introduces himself to Alice (Diane Kruger), the teacher with whom Allen was besotted, and asks her if she somehow encouraged him. Not surprisingly, she’s offended by the question, and refuses his request to accompany him to visit Allen’s grave. When he goes alone, he strikes up a friendship with a man tending to the grave of his teenage daughter who recently committed suicide.

By then, it’s become apparent that Daniel is acting very strangely, which could certainly have been the basis for a provocative film about the outer limits of grief. But to its detriment, Longing never really goes there. Writer-director Gabizon presents the increasingly bizarre events in such a muted manner that drama never kicks in.

Even as Daniel learns more and more shocking things about his son and behaves in increasingly outlandish fashion, such as sitting for hours on the same bench outside the teacher’s apartment building that Allen had perched on to the point of stalking, he never wavers from his too-late devotion.

By the time he proposes a wedding between his late son and the dead daughter of the man he met at the cemetery, viewers will be left shaking their heads. That is, if they haven’t already mentally checked out after the fantasy scene in which Daniel imagines he and his son watching a giant, nude Alice pleasuring herself on the roof of the school building, the same vision Allen had described in his poem.