Jonas Alexander Arnby’s debut feature When Animals Dream was a smart, dreamy werewolf tale that dealt with the quashing of female rage in a close-knit village. His current film, Exit Plan, unfortunately does not match his previous effort.

A suicidal middle-aged insurance investigator named Max (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, attempting desperately to appear less handsome and failing miserably) stumbles upon the existence of a hotel during an investigation of the disappearance of a client’s husband. Incidentally, Max has been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor that will change his personality and make his behavior difficult for his girlfriend to handle, which seems to be his biggest concern.

The Hotel Aurora caters to individuals who want to end their lives. Its staff assists them by giving them the death they want, and not just the physical nature of their demise (pills and guns) but in providing proxies who enable the guests to effect closures that they otherwise would not get. So Max, partly for investigatory and personal reasons, checks into the hotel, and things are, of course, not exactly what they seem.

Where When Animals Dream was suffused with a sense of place, Exit Plan is deliberately sterile. Everything is shot in sleek, steely locations with a strong bluish-gray hue. The hotel is a monolithic, modern monstrosity set on a majestic cliff that makes the guests feel small.

Ultimately, the movie’s greatest sin is that Max, who is in almost every frame, is crushingly dull. He has shockingly little personality. Coster-Waldau is a very good actor, and as anyone who has seen Game of Thrones knows, he will happily tear into a meaty part and leave nothing but the gristle behind. Here he is subdued to the point of zombification. He attempts to give Max some sense of personality through particular personal quirks, such as fumbling his glasses every time he puts them on or stumbling over his words when he has to speak more than two sentences. But there is nothing to be done. Max is simply lackluster.

In the long run, Exit Plan is a mystery: How and why does this hotel exist, and what happens to all these newly dead people? So, eventually, and slowly, the mystery is solved, not by Max’s sleuthing skills so much as by, for some reason, a “Staff Only” entrance left unlocked in an establishment that has plenty to hide. The denouement is ridiculous, bizarre, and so out of left field that you want to throw your hands in the air and yell, “C’mon! Really?”

There are dollops of dry humor, which is as welcome as an oasis in the desert, but for the most part, this is a major disappointment from a talented director.