“The Hateful Eight” is the eighth offering from Quentin Tarantino and, man, is this thing being released with a great deal of hype.

Ninety-eight percent of the film takes place in one enclosed indoor set, which is supposed to represent a mountain cabin &#8212 sort of an outpost and an inn &#8212 in the mountains of Wyoming after the Civil War, where a bounty hunter played by Kurt Russell is taking his prisoner on the way to be hanged.

The prisoner is played by Jennifer Jason Lee, and there are others among the eight people who are sort of locked in this cabin in the midst of a blizzard. Every time they have to go outside, even to relieve themselves, you hear the wind blowing and the door being burst open, and then violence ensues. That’s mostly in the second half.

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For those of you who have trouble stomaching all the violence, this is probably not a movie for you. In fact, I don’t think it’s a movie for anybody.

It’s a maddening film, because it’s full of craft: The score is one of the best things in the movie, the camera work is terrific, the set design is atmospheric. The costumes are fascinating and some of the details are very clever. But the plot makes no sense at all.

It begins to feel like a self-enclosed Agatha Christie, not unlike “Ten Little Indians”: Who’s going to be the last one standing? Who’s really committing the murders? Who really poured the poison? Who did this? Who did that? Who’s going to die? Who’s going to live? Who’s going to survive these ghastly and grizzly wounds?

It’s all comical, stupid and sloppy.

It also makes me think that the most clever thing about the film is Tarantino’s campaign in promoting it. You may remember he came out and made outrageous comments about police officers and identified himself with the Black Lives Matter movement. As a result, there were some people who said they’d boycott Tarantino and this film. That makes the film into a cause, which it doesn’t deserve. The film, honestly, has no deeper meaning, despite the fact that it begins and ends with an intense close up of this snow-encrusted, rugged cross of the crucified Jesus in the Wyoming mountains, which I think they created for this film.

It’s everything that’s wrong with contemporary “art cinema.” It’s another production by Bob and Harvey Weinstein who always have an Oscar campaign.

I ended up feeling that “The Hateful Eight” was a hateful ache. It is also a hateful waste: A waste of talent, a prodigious waste of time (those are three hours I will never get back) and it’s also going to be a profound waste of money.

I give it two stars, only because of the skill involved in the movie.