Writer-director Holly Hardman sort of plays herself in her debut feature Besotted. Her character is a sorceress named Holly who spends her Cape Cod fishing-village vacation magically manipulating the love lives of her new neighbors. Lest the audience miss the metaphor of a filmmaker stepping into the frame to mess with her creations, Hardman also introduces an herbalist (played by Amy Wright) who dispenses love potions and rehearses a play which overtly echoes the plot of Besotted. Hardman's multi-tiered postmodern game-playing would be more impressive if her film's godlike figures were up to some sublime business, but behind all the distancing gimmicks sits a mundane love triangle with a dash of Old Bay. Susan Gibney plays a middle-aged fishing-boat captain who takes on hunky seasonal employee Liam Waite as her "mate" (dual meaning intended), much to the chagrin of town drunk Jim Chiros, who has had a crush on Gibney for years. Luckily for Chiros, Waite already has a girlfriend, which means that the three principals spend their summer just missing each other. Hardman takes great delight in having her character bumble around, accidentally bringing woe to her creations, but that gag wears thin early, and it's not exactly rescued by Besotted's actors. Aside from Chiros—who resembles a gone-to-seed Russell Crowe, and maintains a muddy dignity—the leads engage in the kind of distracting arm-waving and syllable-stressing that might pass for naturalism in a small-town theater workshop, but looks hammy onscreen. The film's key defect lies in the disconnect between its intellectual ambitions and a story better suited to modest regional filmmaking. Hardman never gives her material a chance to develop, because she subjects it to so much forced drama and self-conscious nudging, and when she hits a wall, she gets silly. An early scene where Hardman dances around her backyard to The Kinks' "Destroyer" seems a little indulgent, at least until the climax of the film, which has Hardman and the bulk of her cast dancing around drunkenly, busting out with a stupefying original rap song that explains the story's theme. Yes, that's right. A rap song.