Martin Sheen as an Irish Priest in ‘Stella Days’

“Stella Days” opens with the last rites and closes with a first for a tiny rural parish in Tipperary, Ireland: a movie theater. In between boil all sorts of shenanigans, most of them in the vicinity of Father Daniel Barry (Martin Sheen), a well-traveled priest on loan from the Vatican. More progressive than his bishop or parishioners would like, the good father soon learns that electricity and enlightenment are to be equally distrusted.

Set in 1956 during the country’s Rural Electrification Scheme, the film strains to show that light bulbs and electric cookers are poor weapons against moral and cultural darkness. But even this heavy-handed metaphor is given short shrift by a script (by Antoine O’Flatharta, adapting Michael Doorley’s novel) that skirts caricature but also avoids getting its feet wet in the swamp of Father Barry’s pridefulness.

Raising prickly themes — including adultery, domestic abuse and the entrenched power of the clergy — the director, Thaddeus O’Sullivan, allows them to fade away without comment, or resolves them in comfy cliché. And although the general election that would win Eamon de Valera his second term as prime minister is only months away, his name is mentioned only in passing.

In their place we get gauzy flashbacks to the priest’s childhood, and an unexciting battle between parochial politics (embodied by a perpetually scowling Stephen Rea) and Father Barry’s beloved moving pictures. Relaxed performances and pillow-soft photography compensate somewhat for the story’s narrow ambitions, but they’re not enough to invigorate a movie that clearly would rather charm than challenge.