There is exactly one thing I unreservedly admire in Slender Man: in one shot, the protagonists are huddled around a laptop, and in the background, what appears to be one of their shadows stretches and elongates in a distinctively lanky (one might even say "slender") way, looming over them on the back wall. Everything about the moment cues use to look at the girls in the lower left corner: the color, the lighting, the soundtrack, the composition. And the shadow looming happens just slowly enough that if you're not looking right at it, you might be able to miss the fact that it's moving. It is an altogether subdued scare scene, functioning more as a vaguely creepy, half-conscious awareness of something present in a wrong-ish way. It's unnerving in the same manner of the original Slender Man photos, created by Eric "Victor Surge" Knudsen in June 2009 for a Something Awful forum, or other subsequent attempts by internet folklorists to do suitable creepy things with the figure.

As such, it is a horribly lonely shot within Slender Man's 93 minute running time. The film is a disordered and unfocused ghost story that bears all the very worst habits of the genre, but surely the most awful is its screeching overreliance on very fucking LOUD sound cues. Some of this is from the blaring, cliché-heavy score by Ramin Djawadi and Brandon Campbell; much more of it is from the sound mix itself, which accentuates literally every scene that is in any tiny way meant to be scare with cracking sticks and creaking floorboards and rustling noises that have been cranked up so loud that they compete with the dialogue. At one point, a character is told that the Slender Man will come when the noise of droning cicadas stops; to dramatise this moment, the filmmakers increase the volume of the cicadas. It's really kind of awesome in its way.

The point of this isn't that Slender Man is bad. It is bad! It is so fucking bad I don't even know what to do with myself. But the point is that the film is an assault on your ears, and it's also an assault on your eyes: we are told that Sony gutted parts of the movie for the sake of something or other (running time, keeping within a PG-13 rating, dodging controversy), and so I don't want to be too hard on editor Jake York, but surely it can't all be down to studio meddling. The film is cut with an atrocious lack of concern for rhythm or continuity, ending in scene after scene that's just a whole bunch of B-roll of the woods, occasionally cutting back to an actor's panicked face; it's like a Malick film with shitty lighting and awful, badgering music. It is at times genuinely incoherent, and so mystifying in its construction that when the actions shifts into one of several dream sequences, it almost doesn't manage to register: only the distortion effects applied to some shots tags what we're looking at as "unreal", given how inscrutable the film's baseline reality is.

It's all very overwhelming, in the worst way. I would love to be able to simply call this "boring", for it is that as well. But it's a step worse than that: it is tiring. So much stimulus is being funneled at us, so ineptly, the film feels like an endurance test rather than a fun spook show. Which it was never going to be, anyway, for its limitations as a piece of storytelling are just as profound as its artistic missteps. The film follows four mostly unlikable high school students: Hallie (Julia Goldani Telles), Wren (Joey King, who is, relatively speaking, the "name" in the cast), Chloe (Jaz Sinclair), and Katie (Annalise Basso). Very early on, goaded by Katie's try-hard edgelord leanings and Wren's general anti-social tendencies, the foursome watch a video that purports to "summon the Slender Man", and after a few days, Katie goes missing on a school field trip to a cemetery in the woods. Wren, who has been plagued by nightmares, immediately starts making connections, but Hallie and Chloe need a bit more convincing, by which point it's too late: they've all started seeing a long-limbed humanoid with no face (Javier Botet, who played nearly the exact same role in The Conjuring 2). Pretty soon, the prediction that they'd all be either haunted, driven insane, or taken off to the Slender man's hell dimension is coming true in a very loud, underlit, CGI-poisoned way.

So basically, it's The Ring, which you'd think would give it at least a narrative structure to copy from, but Slender Man can't even do that basic task right. There's basically no narrative drive at all, which stems in part from one of the few remotely interesting things screenwriter David Burke and director Sylvain White come up with: the film doesn't really have a singular lead. Hallie has the most well-developed home life, as well as the only prominently-displayed surname (which she shares with Eric Knudsen), so it's pretty clear that she'll be around for the long haul, but every one of the girls, especially Wren, is put into a longish sequence where the film converts fully to their perspective. This is a cool enough way of structuring an otherwise boilerplate script, and it even gets at something (probably by accident) touching on how Slender Man is fundamentally a communal bit of mythology. The downside is that Wren is very much the only one of the four main characters who is in any meaningful, sustained way active, and so Slender Man only manages to feel like an actual movie when she's in the driver's seat.

So The Ring, but if The Ring was about Naomi Watts doing nothing for seven days and then dying. The film does try to do anything at all: it analogises Slender Man to a computer virus, or a communicable insanity, and if you squint hard enough to make your eyes water, there's kind of something in there about the emerging sexuality of teenage girls (there's a wholly spurious three-scene subplot about Hallie's flirtation with a pretty nerd-boy at school). But it fails in the things it tries: it only succeeds at being loud and clumsy. It's ugly and irritating, though there's the one good shot I mentioned, and a pretty decent scene of Chloe watching live footage of a haunted POV cam skulking towards her bedroom that is ruined only by its poor reprise later on. Otherwise, junk from top to bottom: the film's ineptitude is thrown into relief by its weirdly artful gestures, it's enervating to watch, and all in all, the worst wide-release horror film in a good long time.