Sexual assault may be a point of intense, eye-opening conversation in the country right now, but it’s also still the bread and butter of exploitative junk like “Nomis,” writer-director David Raymond’s debut feature starring Henry Cavill as a brooding Minnesota-by-way-of-the-UK cop on the hunt for a powerful, elusive, serial kidnapper-rapist-murderer.
Jittery and nonsensical, it juggles its influences — “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Seven,” television procedurals — with oily hands and a distracted focus.
Opening with a nervy nighttime chase through snowy woods in which a crying, barely-clad young woman is running from something hellish, and followed by a domestic exchange in which Cavill’s divorced dad lawman schools his online-addicted 13-year-old daughter (Emma Tremblay, “Supergirl”) in how to tell who might be a social-media-finessing creep (no friends in the photos), the movie primes us to believe “Nomis” might be an engaged thriller for our distressed but increasingly awakened times.