From the moment we first set eyes on the title character of “Thérèse Raquin,” the bleak literary melodrama that opened on Thursday night at Studio 54, we know without a doubt that she is doomed, doomed, doomed. Portrayed with a dedicated and joyless intensity by the film star Keira Knightley in her Broadway debut, she makes her entrance in the play’s opening seconds in stern, silhouetted profile, carrying a bowl of water and a heap of bad karma.

Her gait is laboriously slow and measured, as if she were leading a funeral procession for all her hopes and dreams. And though you may assume, dear innocent theatergoer, that things can only lighten up for this poor blighted creature, she will continue to march in lock step with an unforgiving destiny for the succeeding two and a half hours.

Happiness is never in the cards in this tale of murder and adultery. And that’s as true for audiences at this Roundabout Theater Company production, directed by Evan Cabnet, as it is for our gal Thérèse.

Adapted by Helen Edmundson from Émile Zola’s 1867 novel, “Thérèse Raquin” takes the lesson of its plot’s inexorability a bit too much to heart. The show is so determined to demonstrate how destiny never relaxes its stranglehold on its characters that any sparks of pleasure are snuffed out almost before they appear.