Crickets, It’s Your Turn, which saw its UK premiere at Glasgow Film Festival on 4 March, is irredeemably awful.

Nominated for the festival’s Audience Award, Olga Korotko’s sophomore feature is an uncomfortable blend of pretentiousness and distasteful sexual violence, inevitably becoming one of the grindhouse sexploitation flicks it is trying to critique.

From the outset, there is awkward direction and a grimy aesthetic reminiscent of the low-budget cinema from the 70s and 80s. Flipping between the past and the present, drama student performances, and daydreams, the film steals imagery from a plethora of media and smashes them together incoherently. There is an adage that recommends ‘when you leave the house, take one thing off’; for Korotko, she could do with five.

Set in Kazakhstan, Inzhu Abeu plays a socially awkward Merey, swept up in an unconvincing romance with Nurlan (Ayan Batyrbek). Travelling to a secluded cabin with Nurlan and what is essentially a group of strangers, the film’s amateur editing immediately becomes apparent. The group leaves the car to walk the rest of the way, before it cuts to them getting out of the car… again.

Once they arrive, Merey ignores hundreds of explicit signals that Nurlan’s friends are disgusting, leaving her to be portrayed as naïve and obedient. After the group make crude advances on her and assault sex workers, the rest of the women leave, abandoning her to her fate. Here, any realistic protagonist would have escaped – it is challenging to root for a lead who continues into deadly situations with no coercion.

Even in its most uncomfortable scenes, the pretentiousness of the filmmaking is palpable. Nurlan joins his friends in gaslighting and victim blaming, asking Merey if she said no or if she struggled. While challenging these narratives within society is extremely important, it was done extremely heavy-handedly and distastefully for real victims of sexual violence.

This film ended how it began: miserable, pretentious, and utterly misguided. When given a chance to escape after being shot, Merey returns to the cabin to confront the men. She gives a long speech about being a beautiful peacock and surviving, but this is neither cathartic nor contributes towards the feminist conversation. Then, as if to tie all this film’s problems into a neat package, Nurlan shoots Merey in the back of the head, quite literally getting a trophy and a round of applause for the effort.

Crickets, It’s Your Turn so desperately wants you to believe that it is a thoughtful feminist critique of patriarchal structures, yet it routinely abandons the women it is trying to uplift. Due to the visceral reaction it incites, there is an allure for low-budget filmmakers to approach issues of sexual violence. However, failing to execute these themes simply results in the proliferation of media that villainises real victims.

At almost two hours long, there is no reason to watch this film. The swift and inevitable fading into obscurity may be its strongest characteristic.