George Clooney’s directing career is following a depressing downward trajectory. After the early promise of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Good Night, and Good Luck, he’s produced a steady stream of mildly entertaining but ultimately disappointing movies (The Ides of March being the most notable example). But with Surburbicon he produces his first outright dud.

Based on a Coen brothers script, this ill-conceived, mean-spirited, nonsensical movie doesn’t really work on any level. It looks great, but the characters are universally repugnant and stupid, and the storytelling is atrocious. Most of the movie makes very little sense.

It’s probably the character’s overwhelming stupidity that bothered me the most (much more so than how despicable everyone is). The central character, Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon), hires a bunch of criminals to murder his wife so that he can cash in her life insurance. However, he seems completely ill-prepared for the investigation that is bound to follow. You’d think, given the nature of the crime, that he’d have his story worked out. And seeing as he also has a partner in crime, you’d think that person would be prepared as well. But no, they act like imbeciles and immediately rouse suspicion. Someone might know, or think they know, that you’ve done something, but being able to prove it is everything.

In one scene the insurance investigator says that he knows that Gardner murdered his wife. Now the investigator might think he knows this or he might simply be fishing. A stupid person will fall for this tactic and immediately give themselves away, which is what Gardner does. Amazingly, he admits to the murder. You’ve immediately painted yourself into a corner. You’re either going to jail or you’ve got to kill someone else. Gardner decides on the latter. Again, the stupidity here is too much. You’re now going to kill an insurance investigator? You’ve immediately made sure you’re going to jail.

The murder of Oscar Isaac’s insurance investigator tries to straddle that familiar funny/disturbing Coen brothers line, but Clooney is incapable of performing this high wire act. The yowling from Isaac as he realises he’s been poisoned is ridiculous in the extreme - it’s like it’s from a Looney Tunes cartoon. And then the sound effects as Garnder tries to remove a poker from the investigator’s head - there’s lots of crunching and swishing - are just confusing. Is this supposed to be a funny moment? A disturbing moment? I get the grim detail of having the poker get stuck in the guy’s head - in the world of movies, deaths are usually very clean - but I just don’t get the swishing noise. It suggests to me that Clooney is trying to make this darkly funny, when instead it should have been the moment when the gravity of events finally hits home.

Oh, did I mention that the murder of the insurance investigator happens in the middle of the street? Yes, it’s at night, but still. Lots of running and yelling and yowling and bashing and swishing in the middle of the street? I don’t know about you, but my mother would have sniffed that out like a rat and shot to the window like a dart. And what about all the blood that would have been all over the road? Ah, whatever.

I guess one of the reasons that a heinous crime like this can go undetected is because a large portion of the town is distracted by racially abusing a black family in the house next to Matt Damon’s character. The narrative worth of this side story is non-existent because the family is given no screen time and hardly any lines. It’s one of the weirdest frames for a movie I’ve seen. If you’re not going to invest anything in these characters, what’s the point? What, you’re trying to make a point that suburbia is rotten to the core? That behind the civilised exterior lies greed and barbarity? Yeah, you’re already illustrating that with the main story.

Or do you have this frame because you want to indulge in some cute bookending? At the start of the movie there’s a town meeting where incensed locals say that they don’t want a black family in their community. They’re not ready to integrate, they argue, and it’ll lead to the ruin of the town. And then at the end an old lady, talking to some reporters, says that everything used to be normal before the black family moved in.

I can feel the poker hitting me in the head. ‘You see what I’m saying?’ Clooney yells. ‘It wasn’t the family. Everything has been screwed up from the beginning.’ Yes, yes, George. I get it.