There’s something in the woods. There’s always something in the woods, isn’t there? It could be a homicidal killer with an affinity for sports gear, a book that unleashes demons that wreak havoc on unsuspecting college kids, or even witches that create tension and distrust among 16th Century New England families or ill-prepared documentary filmmakers. Given so many examples, it will likely come as no surprise when I tell you that, in the film The Harvesting, there’s something in the woods.

Written by Ben Everhart and directed by Ivan Kraljevic, The Harvesting is a folk-themed horror film about a young family, plagued by marital problems, that decides to spend their summer in Amish Country. But their blissful vacation soon turns deadly when they discover that they are the targets of an evil force that haunts the woods nearby. What we have here is a technically competent film that fails to be engaging and flounders because of its convoluted script.

The biggest (and only) compliment that can be awarded to The Harvesting is that it is proficiently shot. Cinematographer Cody Cuellar capably renders the dense forests and sprawling Amish Countryside with a respectable amount of beauty and elegance, and the film benefits from it. The images are crisp and clean. The colors and lighting feel cinematic. The camera work is smooth and polished. Most impressively, there is a five-minute-long sequence quite early on in the film that is quite gracefully rendered in a single, unbroken take. The whole film is visually palatable and pleasing, and the camera team behind the film should be proud of their work.

With that said, the film suffers from a surprising lack of atmosphere. While the director’s choice to avoid reliance on jump scares and cheap shocks is admirable, the scares that are included don’t land because the film lacks the moodiness and tension necessary to pull them off. For a film set in Amish Country, a place rife with a sense of isolation and tension, almost nothing about its imagery feels foreboding or menacing or suspenseful. The only thing working to establish any sense of mood is the film’s score, which tries so hard to establish suspense and atmosphere that it collapses under its own weight.

It would help build tension if we cared about the characters at the heart of this story, but the ones here are so flimsily drawn that they fail to be engaging. We follow a generic couple with two generic children who suffer from generic marital problems. This is to say nothing of the film’s Amish characters, who spend the whole time being Amish and doing nothing else. All of the performances feel stilted and forced, and it’s hard to pinpoint whether or not this is a writing problem, a casting problem, or a directing problem. When none of the characters are sympathetic or even all that interesting, the audience has no one to root for, and the horror has little to no impact.

Many of The Harvesting’s worst offenses are rooted in its less-than-stellar script. The film spends a great amount of time reminding the audience that there’s some mysterious evil force in the woods that threatens everyone nearby without ever clarifying what it is or why it’s there. This would be fine if the film was not structured like a mystery, dropping clues for a reveal that never actually happens. That’s not to say that the film doesn’t have a twisty, third-act reveal up its sleeve. It most certainly does. But because of the film’s use of two concurrently running timelines—one in the present, one in the past—this third-act-twist spoils itself mid-way through Act I. The film goes from clunky and awkward to borderline incoherent once it reaches its underwhelming climax and tacked on ending.

By the time the credits roll, audience members will surely be scratching their head wondering what exactly happened in the film they just watched. With no characters to root for, no atmosphere to get lost in, and a no satisfying or engaging story beats, The Harvesting can essentially be described as the cinematic equivalent of famine.