Not only do they live in the grey, they idly stand around in the grey. They hang out and watch paint dry in the grey. They knock about, fiddle around, they reinvent the wheel in the grey. They lounge around in the grey. They do anything but perform memorable actions in the grey.

The film is about a Child Protective Services case worker who is living in grief over losing her own son. Her new case involves a young girl who the school thinks is being abused at home… but home appears to be haunted by malevolent ghosts. Because the CPS agent sees dead people.

It’s be charitable to call this lethargic, lugubrious movie a slow burn. It is that, but it’s also living in slow-mo. Everything seems to be happening at half speeds with looong delays between spoken words and even longer, more drawn out scenes of nothing happening. There’s an entire sequence of slow scares in a hospital that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. Just seems to exist to pad the movie with boo jump scares.

When it tries to scare, it seems to pull out the usual bag of trick, though sometimes with some really amateurish camera work. But it feels incongruous for this movie trying to be elevated to lower itself to cheap thrills, especially when the cheap thrills are led to by so much sluggish pacing.

To be fair, the opening twenty to thirty minutes of the movie show promise. They are slow but they feel like they are building to something. And when something pops off, it’s genuinely pretty chilling. But then the movie grinds to a halt in its mid portion and rarely gets back on its feet. By the end, I was constantly checking the run time to see if somehow the two hours had passed.

There’s nothing to hang a hat on in this film. It’s premiering on Shudder if you have that service but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Score: 63