If you’re around my age (early 30s), you might remember an ‘80s TV movie called “Adam,” about the sudden abduction of a 7-year-old boy from a department store. Based on a true story, the horrifically tragic film focuses on the parents’ reaction to the unexplained loss of their son and the subsequent police investigation. The boy turns up dead a month later (with a severed head no less), and the killer is never found. The real-life father (John Walsh) would go on to put bad guys away via “America’s Most Wanted.”

Like “Adam,” “Voice of a Murderer” is a fictionalized account of a true kidnapping story, this time from the early ‘90s in Seoul. In the film, directed by Park Jin-pyo (“You Are My Sunshine”), the only child of a celebrated news anchor (Sol Kyung-gu) and his wife (Kim Nam-ju) is kidnapped by a shadowy figure (the disembodied voice of Kang Dong-won), who proceeds to torment the boy’s parents with anonymous phone calls. It’s not spoiling the end — check the film title — to reveal that the boy, like Adam, ends up dead.

If you’ve seen one kidnapping melodrama, you’ve seen them all, and “Voice of a Murderer” is predictable to a tee. The film’s early scenes establish the family’s happy, bourgeois lifestyle and the close relationship between parents and child, the lovably overweight Sangwoo. When Sangwoo is suddenly snatched away from the front of his apartment building, his parents progress through the familiar stages of emotions over the next 44 days — denial, anger, guilt (mixed with a little heavy drinking), resignation and, finally, inexorable grief.

As a young boy, “Adam” scared me sh-tless, and I suppose if “Voice of a Murderer” was around when I was 8 years old, it would have probably terrified me, too. Or perhaps if I were a parent, the film might be more resonant. But as is, I found the two-hour film to be pretty lousy, even with Park’s direction and a typically solid performance from Sol. It is maudlin, it is morbid, and it is dull to the point that I began to feel like the kidnapper was trying to punish the viewers along with the boy’s parents.

The bulk of the film, which uses on-screen graphics to tick off each day of the ordeal, focuses on the kidnapper’s constant phone calls to the anxious parents. These involve complicated ransom demands that lead to numerous failed cash-delivery attempts, each more desperate than the last. Sol and Kim are fine as a harried, distressed couple, but after about a dozen scenes of utter panic, the performances begin to wear thin. Of course, the filmmaker is inhibited by the fact that the film is based on a true story — meaning the parents can’t go all Song Kang-ho on the abductors à la “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” — but the sheer repetitiveness of scenes is mind-numbing.