Emma Watson’s first lead role post-Harry Potter has seen the star’s new film, a thriller set in Pinochet-era Chile, take only £47 at the UK box office in its opening weekend.

The Colony stars Watson as a woman attempting to infiltrate a cult in order to rescue her husband (Daniel Brühl), who is being held in Colonia Dignidad, a religious community that, in real-life, was founded by Wehrmacht officer and Hitler Youth veteran Paul Schäfer.

The film, which had a distribution plan built on home-streaming, was released on video on demand on Friday, the same day as a token release in three UK cinemas. It follows other titles, such as the Al Pacino thriller Misconduct, that expect to make more money from home streaming than traditional cinema distribution. Misconduct, released last month, made less than £100 in its opening weekend at cinemas.

The Colony, which had its world premiere at last year’s Toronto film festival, was given two stars by the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, who while highlighting its “exploitative dodginess [and] plot-holes the size of Saturn’s rings”, did credit the film-makers for focusing on a rarely told story. “This movie deserves some points for addressing a little-known dysfunctional horror in Chile’s Pinochet era,” he wrote in his review.

Watson has spent her post-Potter career building up credits as a supporting actor. Standout roles since she played Hermione Granger include a turn in Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring as a light-fingered LA teen, playing best mate to Logan Lerman and Ezra Miller in The Perks of Being a Wallflower and starring as herself in Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s apocalypse comedy, This Is the End. She next stars as Belle in Bill Condon’s re-working of Beauty and the Beast.