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Lonely Planet is a romance flick so timid that it feels like a waste of Laura Dern and Liam Hemsworth. Both are excellent choices for a romance, and they seem like a unique pair to put on screen. But they need the right direction to evoke the chemistry to make an audience swoon so that their inevitable jumping into bed feels like a natural progression. With this film’s lukewarm romantic moments, the promised sex scene arrives more inexplicably, as if it were from a different movie.

There’s an uphill battle for the setting of a Moroccan writing retreat. Katherine Loewe (Dern) is a single writer seeking peace to finish her book, while the in-a-relationship Owen Brophy (Hemsworth) is tagging along with his wife with little knowledge of literature. They’re a mismatched and lonely pair who seem like an easy match, considering Katherine’s lack of inspiration and Owen’s crumbling marriage. The problem is there isn’t much for them to do at such a resort. Sure, you can drink and appreciate the scenery, but Kath and Owen are the type of people to walk away from a loud room. Kath wants some peace and quiet for her writing, while Owen wants some time away from his girlfriend, Lily (Diana Silvers), who scoffs at his lack of Dickens knowledge.

There’s a timidness that strains this developing relationship, despite how many fateful meetings the script gives them. Katherine could spend the whole retreat writing in her room, but plumbing problems and noisy repairmen force her out. Owen has a business deal he has to manage over the phone, but poor reception forces him out of the hotel room. The two of them cross paths while on trip into town, where they’ll talk amid shopping local markets and have few moments of genuine connection. They’re nice to each other, but it’s a niceness that rarely seems to cross the line from friend to lover.

There are vulnerabilities explored, but only to a certain degree. Katherine brings up how her last relationship ended with bitterness, highlighting how she was seen as the worse partner. Owen’s girlfriend is staged in an almost cartoonish manner of a bad girlfriend, where she belittles him in company and often stumbles to her room drunk after partying with her fellow authors. It’s clear that Lily is on another path in life and that Owen needs to splinter off into his own, but the film never gives him that moment of realization. Rather, his split is signaled with a revelation so earth-shattering even the most loyal of partners would have ditched. All of these simplistic moments of romantic realizations craft a relationship built on a foundation of convenience and narrative obligation.

This is an and-then romance in how it conspires to force its two leads together. At one point in the film, Owen contracts food poisoning, serving as a perfect excuse for him not to join Lily on her author trek through the Sahara and spend more time with Katherine. I almost expected him to break his leg at some point, ensuring he couldn’t fully escape the resort. But what comes of Owen’s time with Katherine? Some writing encouragement for a novel that is never spoken of much. It’s hard to feel for Katherine’s most tragic moment in the film of losing everything she wrote on this trip when there’s very little time exploring what she has been writing. For a film that finds Owen taking more interest in a writer, there’s a frustrating distance from the medium that is given broad strokes.

Lonely Planet is a romantic drama about writer’s block that seems to have writer’s block in its screenplay. This aspect seems even more vocal when Katherine gets some advice from a fellow author when the right words never seem to come. His advice: Either kill or fuck, since those are the two things you can never undo in life. True to form, this is a film where Dern and Hemsworth fuck, but it’s an act that seems more out of frustration for what to do with the characters, considering the romantic chemistry runs low throughout.