Sacrilege is directed by Paul Catalanotto and follows college student Jessica (Jenn Foreman) (yes, this is another “college students in their 30s” movie), who is shown at the beginning of the film buying a music box for her best friend Samantha’s (Megan Few) birthday. You instantly get the sense something is not right here as the man selling the box seems hesitant to sell it, but accepts her first offer as though money was no concern. Sure enough, as soon as she gets the box, Samantha starts seeing things and hearing a little girl chanting “all good girls want to die,” which I think is a bit of a generalization. Samantha, realizing the likely source of her dismal new companion, tries to destroy the box, but that goes about as well as these things tend to go, and as soon as she enters the house, the box has restored itself to perfect working order.

Eventually, it wears her down mentally and drives her to commit suicide by hanging, returning the music box back to Jessica and her boyfriend, Cole (Jordan Salloum). Shit goes down for them pretty much immediately as the same girl that drove Samantha to kill herself begins feeding on Cole and then chases after and attacks Jessica. Then, after a surprisingly prosaic strategy huddle, they try to destroy the box by burning it, which fails even more spectacularly than it did for Samantha by resulting in Cole having the word “MINE” burned into his chest until they put out the flames. This is where the movie loses me.

Surely, they now have absolute proof that a malevolent spirit is both aiming and able to kill them, they would run off for the hills screaming, right? Not really. In fact, they apparently just kind of live with it for a little while, at least long enough that Cole gets fired for missing too many days at work before they decide to call someone. Cole is initially hesitant to get ghost hunters out to deal with the issue because he’s a rational thinker and wants a science reason for why an evil little ghost girl was just sucking his blood.  Jessica manages to convince him though, by finding someone with a Ph.D. (presumably from Miskatonic University) to set Cole’s mind at ease.

Dr. Harris (Kim Baptiste), the Ph.D. ghostbuster they manage to track down, is a bit of a confusing character herself, as she, along with her cameraman Carl (), acts as though she has already seen cases like this, but at the same time like this is going to be the big one that lands her a lucrative book deal. Really, if you have irrefutable proof of the afterlife, I don’t think you need something flashy to make that take off, but hey, I guess the publishing business isn’t what it used to be. She takes a look at the box and tells them it’s a sacrilege, a demonic artifact created by painting an image of a little girl holding an inverted cross, which invites in trve kvlt demons that have not heard of St. Peter.

It’s not all bad. The film looks good enough and the ghost girl can be quite menacing. Judging from some of the later scenes where they transition from tepid annoyance to manic resignation, Foreman seems like she could have easily been able to turn in a memorable performance if the writing gave her anything to do. Baptiste also comes off as very confident and natural but is also hindered by the indifference that plagues the rest of the film. When you have characters screaming out in agony from the depths of hell and other characters treating the situation like a bed bug infestation or a mild case of herpes, you’re going to have a real tough time selling the reality of that situation, and time and time again, this is where Sacrilege gets caught up. It’s far from the worst thing I’ve seen this year, but while it possesses some technical merit and capable performers, but without establishing emotional investment it’s largely squandered.

The film is available now on RedBox: https://www.redbox.com/movies/sacrilege