Twins Malcolm and Isabell Rademacher have some issues. A tragic car accident took both their parents, and…something…happened at their cabin by the lake that turned Malcolm inward: he doesn’t talk much, he doesn’t like to hang out with his friends, he just keeps going up to the cabin and chopping holes in the ice looking for a missing gas mask.

Jerry J. White III’s new film The Horror has a fractured narrative. Sometimes it’s the present, sometimes it’s the past, sometimes it’s a different past. Usually, I have no problem with movies that follow their own non-linear timeline, and I appreciate filmmakers that force me to think things through and put the puzzle pieces together myself.

First, the good: this is a beautifully shot and directed film. The icy silence of winter, with lonely vistas and the crunch of snow underfoot permeates and gives everything a chilly dread. Jerry J. White III has done a terrific job capturing that winter look that The Horror needs and, on a purely visual basis, he succeeds wildly and should be commended highly.

But.

Unfortunately, there are a couple of problems with The Horror. In the first thirty minutes (of a barely seventy-four minute runtime) the filmmakers chose for Isabell to spend most of it sitting in her therapist’s office, explaining about what happened to her brother. She talks about the car crash. She talks about her mom’s dying words. She talks about her brooding brother. Then a scene of her, her brother, and friends in happier times. Then more talking.

Which would be okay if the dialogue was interesting or dramatic. But it’s delivered in quite the blandest, most unaffected tone I’ve heard in a while. These scenes did not make me curious or really care anything about the characters. Then, when the “incident” that changes Malcolm’s attitude occurs, it’s dealt with and finished in, seriously, less than two minutes. We never know why it happened, who the people were who did it, or anything else about them ever again.

Other than it made Malcolm weird.

By the time the movie wrapped up, what should have been a creepy, unsettling ending was merely a tired retread of other movies I’ve seen that I liked better. I wish I could recommend it fully, but this time Uncle Mike sez don’t bother to check it out.

But. if your idea of a horror movie is watching someone in their therapist’s office describing what happened instead of you actually seeing what happened, then this might be the movie for you.