If ever there was a standard premise, this film has it: two kids break into an abandoned building only to find more than they were looking for.

Jess and Adam’s YouTube channel is not doing as well as the many other channels on the exact same theme: following urban explorers as they break into deserted and forgotten buildings. Then Adam gets a tip off from a subscriber and persuades the reluctant Jess to give it one last weekend chasing their dream of going viral. Off they trot into the wilderness oblivious to the dangers quite obviously awaiting them, and we have a found footage movie for a new generation.

Grace Gallagher plays Jess and her natural style is immediately arresting. There’s relatively little about Gallagher online and a sense that she’s still a star in the making. This looks to be Cameron Wight’s, playing Adam, biggest role to date. He tries a little hard at first but comes into his own later on as that friend who always pushes it too far The film is written and directed by Joby Stephens who seems to have had most success so far as a producer.

It’s once Adam and Jess arrive at the abandoned facility that the film shows off its most impressive aspect – the real abandoned building in which they filmed. It’s clearly not a set but an actual location, already disgustingly decrepit and creepy as hell without a single special effect. Scanning the credits afterwards there wasn’t even a Production Designer mentioned, this place already had it all.

Unfortunately, this is as good as it gets, although the incredible location keeps on giving. While the acting is solid, both script and direction leave a lot to be desired and, inevitably, this affects the performances leading to melodrama; we keep seeing Jess and Adam’s incredulous faces or hearing them gasp before the camera cuts to something essentially ordinary and not unexpected.

The action takes far too long to kick in and Jess and Adam’s bickering – there’s an unfulfilled subplot about the future of their channel and friendship – becomes grating. For anyone who remembers The Blair Witch Project that feeling of wishing the protagonists would just hurry up and die already will be all too familiar. We’re set up so many times with false jump scares that when the really scary stuff finally starts happening, we’re done with our adrenalin being played with.

By the close there’s a lack of resolution, threads aren’t tied up, there’s no real twist and a sense of, so what. Rumour indicates that this, Stephens first feature, was entirely self-funded. Apparently, prosthetics and practical effects were used to elicit more genuine responses from the cast, and the script only loosely adhered to, the actors not always knowing what was about to happen. All credit to cast and crew for their commitment. However, the location is the only really stand out part of this production; the fact that a place like that exists in real life is far scarier than the film.

Screened at part of Edinburgh International Film Festival