A young couple’s dream of starting a family shatters as they descend into the depths of paranoia and must struggle to survive an evil presence that wants nothing more than their very own lives.

Isabelle: you’ve seen this movie a million times before. A young couple (Amanda Crew and Adam Brody) moves into a house with creepy neighbors. No character, no chemistry. Just blandly going through their lives, and then she has a miscarriage, flatlining for one whole minute! When she comes back, she is open to some malevolent forces. Along the way, we red herring with drugs, schizophrenia, home invaders, but of course the ankh-wearing shaman is right: it’s a spirit (named Isabelle, of course) that covets Karen Larissa Kane’s vitality and wants to take over her life.

Am I giving too much away? That much at least is in the trailer. If the creators had any hope of tricking someone into thinking this was anything different, it blew it there.

The horror CGI is laughable (CGI babies never work). And there was one scene in particular where the evil entity attacks a character by slamming a spooky wheelchair into them that made me seriously laugh out loud enough to annoy my roommate. Self-animated wheelchairs just aren’t scary and never have been (lookin’ at you, Silent Hill 4).

And don’t get me started on the girl with Spina Bifida being scary because she was in a wheelchair and “mute” or the throwback horror of 80’s style Satanic Panic child abuse.

It is clear that the writer (Donald Martin) and director (Robert Heydon) have never met a psychiatrist, priest, hippie psychic or a married couple. If you look into their filmographies you don’t see much in the way of horror, either, and it shows: the film fails to build tension or deliver scares or surprises. Just a lot of CGI red, glowing eyes. I wonder if there was any of that in Operation Christmas.

This feels like a cynical film, intended to be cheaply made and ride the coattails of new adult moving-in horror like Insidious. Cynical enough to name it similar to another horror film that is famous enough that someone might accidentally choose this one by mistake? I am not sure I can go that far, but … maybe.

Isabelle isn’t all that bad. It’s just boring. There’s no reason to care about anyone involved, and the tropes it relies on are so tired they really need to be retired for the next ten years at least. I had brief hopes of some Rosemary’s Baby or Exorcist action, you’d expect them from parts of the beginning third, but nope. Nothing that cool. They even teased us once by describing a conversation about a vision of Hell that would have been 2,000 times more interesting than any part of the story that actually made it into the film. But that was a microcosm of the film: a recount of a conversation about something that might have been interesting. Two steps removed from a story worth telling.