Little more than a collection of audio-visual horror movie clichès stitched atop a daddy’s-gone-for-the-night campfire tale, David Charbonier and Justin Powell’s The Djinn feels like a short film puffed out to feature length without the content sufficient to support said feature status. The film follows Dylan (Ezra Dewey), mute son to a late-night DJ and single father (Rob Brownstein) who decides to mess around with a haunted book and ends up summoning a djinn, which for the purposes of this film is basically an evil genie.

Throughout Middle Eastern mythology, djinn are thought to be intelligent spirits that have the ability to possess human and animal forms. Supernatural angels of a sense, djinn are neither innately good or evil however in Charbonier and Powell’s minimalist script, there is no room for nuance and therefore the spirit that comes to haunt Dylan is as one-dimensionally evil as they come. It also possesses the power to grant their summoner one wish, a fact Dylan is overwhelmed by when he finds The Book of Shadows.

As so often happens with cursed texts, the pages warns that in order for Dylan to obtain his “spell of desire” he must make a sacrifice of his own, in this case: to withstand the Djinn for an hour. It’s a fitting curse akin to the watching of the movie itself as no matter of time spent with The Djinn will lead to any wish come true, the horror dud a pitiable waste of time for all involved.

Charbonier and Powell build their brief, bland 80-minute feature around the most simple of premises – the mute Dylan must survive the company of the djinn in his one-bedroom apartment for a full 60 minutes. As the creature transforms into different forms, Dylan averts, battles, and runs in circles with the hopes of getting his one wish: to have a voice. Shot in a single location, a just-moved-into apartment that’s as lifeless as the film itself, The Djinn has no kinetic energy to its proceedings and even the primary color-soaked cinematography of Julián Estrada does little to evoke a sense of otherworldly haunting or dread.

As the viewer quickly discovers that the runtime will be spent in childish repetitive avoidance; running around the apartment, hiding in closets, spraying the spirit in the eyes with bug spray; and realizes that the film is lacking in anything resembling scares, it’s increasingly harder to stay engaged. And yet, many a plot contrivance exists so as to drag the movie on to feature length, with none of it adding to character growth, complicating the plot, or even once throwing us off its abundantly obvious track.

Perhaps the greatest issue haunting The Djinn is its broken premise. It’s all well and good to execute a film economically and sometimes a more stripped down, barebones feature can be the scariest of all (think Blair Witch Project, Night of the Living Dead, Open Water, and Paranormal Activity). But The Djinn sets itself up for failure by essentially delivering a one-man show where that one man is a child actor playing mute. It’s a strange choice and with an unconvincing child performance from Dewey, we’re just left out to sea with nothing really to cling onto other than the audio-visual offerings and predictable silent-film plotting.

It doesn’t help that Dylan as a character is monstrously bland. He’s not especially clever or brave (and he certainly doesn’t have anything of interest to say). Even his being mute doesn’t really factor into the showdown with the djinn, the movie failing to do anything of interest with his handicap in a way that movies like Don’t Breathe and Hush did so effectively. Instead his muteness feels more like an excuse for Charbonier and Powell to skimp out on writing dialogue.

Instead, the duo lean on a Stranger Things wannabe score from Matthew James to do a lot of the heavy lifting, trying to tap into a sense of nostalgia and tonal familiarity to propel what is otherwise an idea-bereft feature. With few scares, a lackluster lead, a total lack of compelling dialogue, and an endless parade of clichè horror tableaus (a demonic reflection in the mirror! a grabbing arm bursting through the wall! quietly tiptoeing over a creature that looks defeated!) the house of cards come crumbling fast. Even in its final moments, The Djinn revels in its failure, building to a ‘be careful what you wish for’ twist ending that only feels like the beginning of the story, further highlighting just how much of what comes before it is meaningless filler.

CONCLUSION: The kind of horror movie that gives horror movies a bad name, ‘The Djinn’ is an abject failure of understanding what makes horror work. The second feature from writer-director duo David Charbonier and Justin Powell should have been a short film as they clearly did not have enough ideas to flesh out even its paltry 80-minute runtime.