Dark Entities is an hour and fifty-six minutes before credits and I don’t think it needed to be. I believe one of its biggest problems is the combination of the runtime and how that time is spent. There are a few too many scenes of people stumbling in the dark. New characters are introduced late into the runtime and are not explored enough to justify their introduction. They take time away from the core characters, and those core characters need it.

Dark Entities, written and directed by Brandon McLemore, is about three siblings, Vera (Elena Ontiveros), Wes (Brandon McLemore), and Ethan (Jackson Lee Turner) Winters, who inherit an old family home. After merrily moving in they are forced to face the home’s dark secrets.

If you watch this movie and forget that Ethan exists during the latter half, no one can blame you. Wes is not just going through a character arc, but he’s going through a character arc that is essential to the story. It is such a huge shame that even though Dark Entities is almost two hours long, it doesn’t give Wes’s arc the time it needs to function properly. In the beginning, I barely got a sense of who Wes was. He initially spent a lot of time off-screen. There is a good bit of lip service about who Wes is and was, but lip service is not how you get people invested in a character. That’s not satisfying. The audience needs to see it. The acting is consistently unconvincing. The characters are all rather bland except one. Most of the character relationships are basic or near non-existent. The exception is the relationship between the two older siblings, Vera and Wes. Their relationship is the most dynamic. The dialogue is alright. Nothing said will stick in your head, but it gets the job done.

Dark Entities wisely chooses to focus on its character’s reaction to the supernatural more than the supernatural events themselves. The lighting is very good and very consistent. There are a few scenes that look gorgeous. The audio and the music sound good, but this is a situation where the music is doing a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to building suspense. Scenes are often heavily reliant on the score. As is the case with most films that fall into this trap, there are scenes with spooky music that are neither spooky nor lead to anything spooky. Worse, there are scenes with spooky music paired with events that I found unintentionally funny. As someone who is not easily manipulated by the score of a horror movie, I felt no sense of thrills or suspense during my viewing experience.

Dark Entities doesn’t offer anything new or creative besides how it represents its particular brand of ghost and why. It functions via a well-worn formula. If I were to recommend this to anyone, it would be fledgling horror fans around 8-11 years old. There is no gore or nudity, I don’t recall any cursing, and children may not be as affected by many of its flaws. If Lil’ Timmy is running amok then get Dark Entities started and maybe he’ll be still for two hours.

4 out of 10