Insidious is so sure of its intrinsic thrill that it allows the audience in on its every machination. Ringing, dissonant piano notes not only accompany every scare, but foreshadow them long before Character A finds himself alone at Location B to await Grizzly Fate C. Director James Wan, of Saw and Doggie Heaven fame, dolls out the suspense with all the subtlety of an ACME sledgehammer to the face, so satisfied to bask in his macabre, B-movie prowess that he forgets to offer anything more.

If the audience wants to know what’s coming, they don’t have to wait for the sound cues. It begins with Renai and Josh (Rose Byrne, Patrick Wilson) moving their family into a new home, only to find previously-shelved books mysteriously thrown to the floor. Renai is too frazzled to think much of it; perhaps she hasn’t seen the horror films we have, in which evil spirits signal their intentions by throwing books and banging around as a matter of course. There are more overt signs to come: Dalton, her inquisitive son, explores their attic by a lantern that shadows his worst nightmares on those suburban cave walls. A piano chord strikes, and he falls into a coma for which medical science has no answer. Mightn’t they ask the attic furnace, you wonder, its hinged door growling like a demonic mouthpiece?

Months pass with little apparent progress, but their other son, Foster, knows the truth: “I’m scared of Dalton” he tells his parents, “I don’t like when he walks around at night”. Unburdened of petty exposition, the film concentrates on mining its rudimentary scares. Ghostly figures appear in windows, only to disappear upon second glance. Josh investigates a loud banging at the front door, finding nothing but bad omens. At the other end of the house, an alarm sounds while an unattended door swings open in the howling wind outside. The modulation of outdoor noises and transient sightings indoors mimics The Strangers, an overlooked Liv Tyler vehicle that evoked similar horror with a far clearer sense of dread. Here, I mostly just felt like they needed a handyman.

Horror movies live and die by their patience for keeping the menace off-screen: think of Jaws’ infamous reticence, or that James Cameron’s Aliens allowed an hour or more to pass before our first sighting of Giger’s Xenomorphs. For a while at least, Insidious follows their path to a passable sense of foreboding, but even the shrewdest purveyor of horror would struggle to ring any real tension from this tired plot: a young boy’s soul acting as the prize for ghouls from beyond is a plot point as creaky as the house it takes place in, and Insidious makes no attempts to re-imagine the scenario. It even conspires to bring a lively Jessica Fletcher-type to the door as the bearer of bad news and dramatic pauses. “It’s not the house that’s haunted” Elise (Lin Shaye) remarks, heralding the films one moment of nostalgic thrill, “it’s your [PIANO CHORD] son”.

Josh is unconvinced by her sorcery, which is odd when you consider that five minutes earlier he was standing in a bedroom torn asunder by rampaging sprits. How does he suppose that happened? The answer comes in a vaguely intimidating séance enabled by an unlikely World War-era gas mask. Elise dictates from the spirit world to furiously scribbling Ghostbuster sidekicks – a screwball flourish all on their own – but the film’s predictable escalation to full-on possessed allows any accidental tension to dissipate into pantomime scares recalling nothing more terrifying than Rentaghost.

Consumed by its fascination with all things that go bump in the night, this is the progression from a familiar story of possession to the kind of amateur dramatics one might encounter on a ghost train at the fair. Insidious isn’t sad because its story is dull – though it is – but because Byrne, Wilson and Shaye deserve so much more. Granted, Shaye need only show up for our own recognition of her role and purpose to do most of the work for her, but Bryne and Wilson do wonders with limited material to give their marriage heartache in a few tender scenes. They sit on the porch to their house, and Renai pleads with her husband to share the burden. “I need you, but you’re never here. Where are you? You’ve avoiding this, like everything else”. Hints to past heartbreak are scenes that belong in a different, better, movie, but which instead find themselves sharing the screen with ridiculous, unearthly contrivances, and the single piano note that follows them everywhere.