Campbell Scott’s debut feature is a lot like his usual onscreen personality: demure, soft-spoken, and emanating a stony intelligence. He tends to be blank, but he is watchable because you feel that he isn’t blank, just lacking some key to his own heart and soul that he may, at any moment, discover and use. “Final” is the same. There’s nothing particularly compelling about it, and yet you keep pace with it, hoping that its depths will be revealed by the time the credits roll.

In the end, though, when its secrets are on display, “Final” makes a strong case that its watchability was largely accidental. “Final” really is, in budget and look, a student film, but the odd thing is that Scott takes so few risks. This sort of film, which takes place mostly in one room, and only moves around to a handful of other locations, normally leaps off the screen with hard-charging cinematography whose primary purpose is to conceal the lack of sets, actors, and special effects (think Darren Aronofsky’s frenetic “Pi”). The amazing thing here is that Scott apparently felt obligated not to be pretentious. Like his hero, he walks at all the moments when he should be running, and you find yourself wishing he’d let his imagination go a little bit.

Hope Davis and Denis Leary, in a departure from his garrulous persona, manage to bring what could have been a white-knuckle story of madness and sci-fi intrigue down to the level of suspense you’d encounter in, say, “My Dinner With Andre”. Leary apparently believes that serious acting means not getting excited, and this was a disastrous choice for the role, since any sense of danger the script attempts to create is consistently popped. Leary doesn’t seem particularly rushed to figure what’s happening to him, even though he’s supposed to feel certain that death awaits him. Davis, for her part, looks like she didn’t get to the end of the script. Most of her scenes with Leary look she’s merely reacting to another actor leading an improvisational exercise in a weeknight actor’s workshop.

Incoherent, slack, and shot with a directorial style as faceless as the director himself, the film is a no-budget reminder of why student films are so seldomly screened for the world.