Showing @ Filmhouse, Edinburgh, until Thu 1 Dec

Nick Murphy / UK / 2011 / 107 mins

The scary movie genre has been forced into call-back territory for many years now; directors showing off their love for Hitchcock, Hollywood throwing in CGI trickery and liberally wild attempts at adapting crime horrors. Nick Murphy’s ordeal psycho-thriller contains some genuinely jumpy moments, but almost feels like a period spoof. Unnecessarily set a few years after the end of the First World War, ‘hoax exposer’ Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall) is called in to an appropriately creepy private boarding school by Robert Mallory (Dominic West) to investigate mysterious sightings of a ghost child, and of course, it’s more than she bargained for.

Murphy’s background in TV really shows in this feature, as the tinted winter veneer resting on the film’s surface gives the whole thing a gloomy Midsomer Murders exterior. Cold and unsettling, the characters are predictably sinister, unwilling to help Cathcart in her quest to uncover the mystery swallowing up the vacant mansion. After watching The Wire, it’s hard to view West as anything other than a madcap Baltimore murder police, as he gets back to his quintessentially English accent. Distorted faces and heightened music make up much of the “scary bits”, some relatively effective, while nodding towards a lurking atmosphere created in The Others; so while it’s watchable, it really doesn’t play around with the genre enough to warrant acclaim.