The old postapocalyptic shuffle is alive in Young Ones, but this catastrophe is more credible than most such speculations. The problem here is water, which has evaporated, at least in this corner of the world. Patriarch Ernest Holm (Michael Shannon, apocalypse vet from Take Shelter) trades trinkets in exchange for supplies, and just manages to keep hold of his “farm”—a patch of brown desert—in hope that the soil needs only the rain to come back. But the film’s real attention is on the next generation, played by a trio of child stars aging into young adulthood. Holm’s patient son Jerome (Kodi Smit-McPhee, the kid from The Road) and resentful daughter Mary (Elle Fanning) must negotiate their future with the ambitious Flem Lever (Nicholas Hoult of Warm Bodies, soon to appear in the Mad Max reboot). Ernest isn’t crazy about Flem hanging around with Mary, for reasons that turn out to be pretty well-founded.

Young Ones nods toward science fiction with its Mad Max fashion sense, its filling stations—for water, not gasoline—and its four-legged robot/beast of burden. Beyond that, writer/director Jake Paltrow is content to rely on the traditions of the Western and a visual approach that seems to be aiming somewhere between the worlds of Terrence Malick and Paul Thomas Anderson. The tone is grim and the look is arty; the storylines stick out in random directions. Overall, it’s a mess, with its biggest fault the failure to color in the sole female character of significance—an especially unforgivable failing with Fanning coming off the remarkable Ginger & Rosa and Maleficent.

If it’s a misfire, though, Young Ones at least conjures some haunting stuff along the way. The bleak dystopian landscape (shot in South Africa) helps, as does an intriguing and sometimes stirring score by Nathan Johnson. Hoult’s streak of smiling untrustworthiness—currently flowering in Jaguar commercials—is put to good use here, and Paltrow photographs Smit-McPhee as though he were the young Abraham Lincoln, all gangly limbs and soulful eyes. Left unexplored is the brother/sister relationship that the film only belatedly comes around to. (Speaking of that, yes, Jake Paltrow is the brother of Gwyneth.) It’s not quite odd enough to be a future cult film, but at least this movie lingers in the mind. Runs Fri., Oct. 31–Thurs., Nov. 6 at Grand Illusion. Rated R. 100 minutes.

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