I’m sad to damn this ambitious horror film with faint praise because it comes off like yet another generic PG13 horror flick… you know the ones I’m talking about. But it goes all serpentine and gets enough right to settle into my “good but not great” tier… but it should have been better.

So It Feeds is about a psychiatrist who can Dreamscape her way into your inner world and solve your mental hang-ups. But when a little girl barges into her office with an invisible spook feeding off her life essence, she (or her daughter) must act.

This film does great mood… it creates a palpable sense of dread and uncertainty that’s impressive. It also tells its story in a way that doesn’t feel like every “there’s a gimmicky ghost picking us off one at a time” generic B horror flick. It has a rolling, strolling storyline that puts its characters in predicaments that feel like what they’ll be doing for the rest of the movie. But then it moves on. It weaves in and out of various scenarios leaving the audience unsure where it’s going.

Somehow this “I haven’t even heard of this movie” movie tells an ambitious story that feels like a full meal.

Which is too bad since it also tells this winding, weaving story in a pretty mundane way the left me distracted and a little bored. It kills me to give it a score in the high 70s. It’s too ambition and foreboding and it deserves better. But I can’t go there because the flick, once you dig past its genuinely creepy tone, just isn’t interesting. My attention kept flagging and the time remaining refused to budge.

But I’m giving it a bit of a pass because maybe that’s just me (t’s on the cusp of a higher score). I bet there’s enough creepy cool going on that less Judgy McJudgersons will not even notice my nitpicks. I hope so because I’d like people to find a fun creepy film they’d never heard of… and I wish the filmmaker’s the best. They were onto something… it just didn’t fully work for this grump.

Score: 79