Like the inventors of the vibrator it depicts, "Hysteria" really aims to please. And like an inattentive lover displaced by the sexual aid, the film never quite satisfies.

True to the title, there are a few hysterically funny moments as a couple of Victorian-era British doctors and an amateur inventor stumble into the creation of a mechanical device to pleasure women. Yet despite the novel premise, "Hysteria" feels as though it’s going through the motions as the filmmakers strain to rouse art-house audiences to ecstasy.

The fictionalized story built around Dr. Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy), who patented an electric massager around 1880, is choked with clichés playing the era’s prim and proper morality against progressive, freethinking ideals that would take hold in the coming decades.

Director Tanya Wexler and screenwriters Stephen and Jonah Lisa Dyer are so determined to hammer modern social values onto their 19th-century story that they create a movie of cardboard extremities. That leaves Dancy and co-stars Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jonathan Pryce and Felicity Jones either standing stiffly upright in drawing-room restraint or quaking and spouting on a soapbox, with little room in the middle for them to behave like real people.

Dancy’s Mortimer is a modern man of science, continually losing jobs as he preaches such concepts as hand-washing to kill germs to bosses who still think leeches and a good blood-letting are all it takes to cure patients.

Then he lands a cushy position as assistant to Dr. Robert Dalrymple (Pryce), who specializes in manipulating a woman’s uterus to produce "paroxysms" — the release of nervous tension to treat a catch-all disorder known as hysteria.

Mortimer is attracted to Dalrymple’s demure and prudish daughter Emily (Jones) and shocked at the behavior of his other daughter, Charlotte (Gyllenhaal), a suffragette who campaigns for women’s rights.

There’s no Big O to this origin story of the vibrator. Just little oohs and aahs here and there that add up to some tickling, fleeting moments of pleasure.