Unspooling from its reels in pretty little loops and curlicues, writer-director Gerard Stembridge's About Adam slaps a bright red bow on an empty box, refusing beyond all reason to be about anything more than advertising itself. Beautifully structured and capably executed, Stembridge's story is full of inherent potential, overlapping the perspectives of four Irish siblings, each seduced by a handsome young man's otherworldly charms. Magnetic as ever, even when wrestling with a questionable accent and a stereotypical character, Kate Hudson stars as the youngest of three sisters—and the first to lay eyes on Stuart Townsend, a new face at the Dublin restaurant where she waitresses and sings. A bubbly, naïve romantic, Hudson is instantly swept off her feet by his sensitivity and adventurousness, and her entire family follows in kind. But Townsend's malleable personality also makes him the perfect man for Hudson's sisters: Frances O'Connor, a bookish academic with a weakness for poetry, and Charlotte Bradley, the eldest, who can't resist his appeal to her maturity and experience. Even their brother (Alan Maher) begins to question his sexual proclivities. About Adam covers their points of view in four separate chapters that often circle back to the same events, adding new layers of subtext and irony to scenes that seemed conventional the first time through. But Stembridge is either blind to the many sinister comic possibilities, or so intent on pleasing the audience with high-concept fluff that he chooses to ignore them. Townsend's opaque good looks and chameleon-like ability to transform into every woman's fantasy echoes The Talented Mr. Ripley, but no attempts are made to uncover his true identity, or at least to find the hollow place where his identity should be. On a similar note, the fact that Hudson's three siblings are all knowingly, simultaneously betraying her might have led to something slightly more substantial than the frantic lies and contrived near-misses of the average sitcom. A reasonably diverting time-passer, About Adam proves that Stembridge knows his way around feel-good pap, but it's just smart enough to suggest he's either selling himself short or merely selling out.