Emma’s quiet beach retreat takes an unsettling turn with the arrival of an enigmatic artist out of her mother’s past. He challenges, enthralls, and frightens her, as she comes to suspect him of a terrible crime.

Many people would tell you that spending time at a house on the beach in the Hamptons is their idea of a blissful summer getaway. It’s the kind of place where you could let all of your troubles wash away with the waves that crash upon the shore. But as horror genre has taught us, bad things can happen in even the most innocuous of places, and Jason Saltiel’s uneven, garden variety directorial debut Beach House attempts to remind us of that fact.

Written by Saltiel and Matt Simon, Beach House is a psychological thriller that follows Emma (Willa Fitzgerald of MTV’s Scream), a struggling writer whose summer with her parents at their beach house takes an unexpected turn when she’s introduced to her mother’s art photographer friend Paul (Murray Bartlett). While initially smitten with the enigmatic photographer, Emma soon begins to suspect that Paul may be responsible for a terrible crime.

If there’s one thing that the film nails, it would be the dynamic between its two leads. While the whole cast does a fine job, Fitzgerald and Bartlett are the clear standouts here. The curiosity and budding lust that Emma feels toward Bartlett’s suave, mysterious character Paul plays naturally, and the interplay between them is rife both with mutual artistic interest and sexual tension. As Emma discovers that Paul may have been responsible for a murder, the tension shifts from sexual to life-threatening, Fitzgerald does a commendable job of transitioning that tension from sexual to full-on fear for her and her family’s safety. Bartlett too has fun adding layers of creepiness to his character while still maintaining the smooth, sensual nature of his character that initially made him so alluring.

While the chemistry between the leads certainly helps keep the film afloat, Beach House ends up being weighed down by its awkward story progression. The film attempts to be a slow-burn, unraveling the Shadow of a Doubt-like mystery at its center methodically. This would be fine if the mystery itself wasn’t so thinly drawn and simple. The film actually appears to play its blood-spattered hand quite early on, with Emma discovering some disturbing photographs of a possible murder among Paul’s personal belongings. It then proceeds to backpedal significantly, assuaging Emma’s worries about Paul only to re-reveal that something might be amiss as the film crosses the threshold between acts two and three. While the cast does their best to keep things intriguing, the whole thing moves at such a meandering pace that it feels like a short film that was painstakingly stretched to make it feature length.

But the film certainly does not meander through its thriller parts. Rather, it rushes through them quickly, as if they were tacked on. This is especially true for the film’s climax, in which the antagonist and heroine face off in a scene that ends with an abrupt whimper rather than an intense struggle. That’s not to say that the film is over at this point. It actually still has one last shocking twist up its sleeve that, while commendably surprising, feels preposterous and contrived.

Overall, Beach House is a pretty mixed bag of a film. It’s bolstered by solid performances from its cast and certainly exemplifies Willa Fitzgerald as a competent young actress to watch out for. But its muddled writing and sluggish pacing keep it from being the thrilling, seaside nail-biter that it could have been.