There’s a disorientation to Premonition. Not the one victimizing Linda Hanson (Sandra Bullock), a woman forced to live the week of her husband’s sudden death out of sequence. The disorientation is a lack of center to the film, a lack of thematic direction, a problem exacerbated by indistinct direction from Mennan Yapo. The performances are serviceable, but the material never lets the actors do much beyond reacting to the unlikely and the improbable. And no, I’m not talking about the fantasy elements of the story. I’m talking about the plot holes and shifting motivations.

Linda’s situation is a bit of a pickle. One average morning she wakes up, takes her kids to school, and comes back to be told by the sheriff that her husband Jim (Julian McMahon) has died in a car accident. She pulls her kids out of school, mourns, begins to grasp the edges of the grief to come – and wakes up the next morning to find him alive again. A day of utter normalcy convinces her she’s had some strange kind of dream, until she wakes up the next morning… and Jim is dead again. Funeral preparations have begun.

It gets worse. Her entire week is lived completely out of sequence, and each day post-death reveals Linda’s life in greater and greater dissolution. Her daughter’s face, for instance, is a mess of sewn-up scars, and no one seems to know why. Least of all Linda. (Why Linda doesn’t just ask her daughter to recount what happened is one of the many, many questions Premonition leaves hanging.) Just when Linda seems ready to sink into despair, she instead makes a sharp turn to a coldness that’s a little off-putting. I think the five stages of grief are jumbled in here somewhere, but Linda experiences it all so quickly that it’s hard to get much of a handle on what she’s feeling (or why she’s feeling it) at any given time.

In the latter parts of the week, Linda finds prescription pills from a particular doctor. It seems those pills are a part of her path of self-destruction. What does she do when she wakes up in the earlier part of the week again? Why, she goes to that very same doctor and makes claims she knows will sound insane. When the doctor makes the prescription, she takes it. Uh?

And maybe that’s my central frustration with Premonition. Are these events pre-determined? Does acting differently in the “past” create a different future? These questions aren’t just compelling, they’re necessary for understanding the engine of the plot. Linda, unfortunately, has no interest in asking them. Instead she flies in the face of Fate at one turn while knowingly falling in step with it at another. When she does start asking questions, it’s all the wrong ones. As with most modern imagination-deficient psychological thrillers, Linda approaches the two shamans of the modern age: the Shrink and the Priest. The shrink only has pills for her, and the priest offers a completely superfluous explanation for Linda’s condition in a classic example of what I like to call the Trivia Reveal.

The Trivia Reveal is a single scene in a book, movie, or whatever, when the final revelatory piece of information is given, and you just know in the bottom of your heart the whole story was generated from the writer reading that little piece of trivia somewhere. The priest scene seems a likely candidate, with its weird quasi-religious implications so completely out of place with everything else before or after. To me, an obvious Trivia Reveal scene is a sign of structural weakness, like a human born with his heart on the outside.

Would that were the only problem with Premonition. It’s not offensively bad, merely dull and occasionally stupid, another in a long line of movies that will be forgotten two months after release, and then two months after it hits DVD. Your time and psychic energy is better spent elsewhere.