For a first-time filmmaker, Ishana Night Shyamalan shows promise with The Watchers. Her debut, a folklore-infused horror mystery based on a novel by A.M. Shine, suffers more from its source material than from the creator behind the camera. On her way to deliver a bird to a zoo in Belfast, Mina (Dakota Fanning) finds herself stranded in a forest. She abandons her broken-down car and searches for help, only to find herself trapped in the labyrinthine rows of trees.

This forest is home to a mysterious presence, creatures that come out at night. Mina is told of this by a woman named Madeline (Olwen Fouere), who brings her to a strange, one-room enclosure that protects its inhabitants from being dragged away into the underground tunnel system created by the shadowy monsters. This building also serves as a viewing platform of sorts, where the creatures come out at night to watch their human prisoners perform.

As in her father’s work, Shyamalan’s story unfolds slowly and eerily, presenting questions that beg for answers that will allow the mystery to cohere into something more legible. The problem is that the answers are far less than satisfying, and the coherence of the final picture is dubious. A telegraphed reveal bogs down a third act that already stretches on for too long. And the whole ordeal leaves a couple of glaring plot holes that could have been forgiven in a more thrilling film.

Shyamalan’s visual sensibility is fairly strong throughout the film’s sequences in the darkened forest. There are a handful of tense moments early, but as the story progresses the tension unspools with it. What’s more, the longer these characters spend time interacting with each other, the more the film reveals its flaws. The dialogue is often clunky, and the characters are underdeveloped (there’s a reason we haven’t talked very much about the individuals locked in this human zoo). Mina never got over the death of her mother years earlier. Ciara (Georgina Campbell) has a husband who was left out in the forest overnight and is thus presumed dead. Daniel (Oliver Finnegan) had an abusive, alcoholic father once upon a time. Madeline is a teacher. These are basically all the things we know about these characters.

With that being the case, the film relies heavily on its mysterious plot to carry the load. It’s simply too much weight for that mystery to hold. Again, the source novel may be as much to blame for this as Shyamalan’s delivery of the material. Regardless, the script struggles to lay out the details in a thrilling manner. The rules established to prop up the mystery are meant to be broken, and the explanations for how this situation in the woods came to be occur in uninteresting expository passages late in the film. The more you learn, the less intriguing it becomes.

The Watchers: C

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—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)