Ace Jordan’s new movie Silent Retreat has a lot going for it at the outset: good acting, a beautiful location, bloody bits. Ultimately, however, it becomes a muddled mess, with characters you don’t really care about getting slaughtered for reasons that aren’t very clear.

And that’s a shame, because it’s a very good-looking movie, with some great talent involved in it, and some decent effects. The script, though, just isn’t up to snuff, and the characters’ motivations for many actions remain unclear to me, even now.

Also, just to be clear, there are two recent movies with the title Silent Retreat. This is the 2016 one.

Donny Boaz and Rebecca Summers star as Zacry and Meigan, two co-workers on their way to a retreat for their department at work to…get stuff done? It’s never clear what they hoped to accomplish on this working weekend, other than boss Dale’s remarking “you’ll have plenty of time to relax once we get our work done.” Okay.

The dialogue is clunky and odd and doesn’t flow naturally at all and even seems wildly inappropriate at times. At the first staff meeting smart aleck Tedi makes some really out-of-bounds comments, including saying he “tugged one out” earlier. In front of his co-workers. And his boss. Oookaaay.

And slutty nutty Lira just happens to bring along some random guy that nobody knows, and he just hangs out in the meeting with them. And has very loud sex with Lira nightly. And plays a quick game of “ass/cooter/mouth” with Tedi. Weird.

Not “David Lynch oooh that’s very weird and cool” but more like “Huh. Weird. Humans don’t talk or act like that in real life.”

It turns out this cabin (which is kind of out in the middle of nowhere, but also on a lake, with a separate caretaker’s cabin home conveniently nearby) used to be some kind of asylum. We get flashbacks of a young boy, Ned, in the asylum (which doesn’t look like the cabin at all–maybe they tore it down and rebuilt?). In his first scene, he is sitting on the floor with a carved box in front of him, splattered in blood. What’s in the box? Don’t know. Yet.

At another point, Jesus-lover and owner of the most annoying childish voice ever Rita (Trista Robinson) goes for a morning walk and just…disappears. Never comes back. And nobody else seems to notice or care. For hours. Until it gets dark.

Ooookaaaay.

At this point I started to check myself out of this movie. The flashbacks with creepy kid Ned seem to have some connection with the cabin group, but it’s kind of fuzzy: is Ned possessing people and making them do bad things? Is the caretaker doing it all? Will Tedi ever get laid? So many questions.

Meigan discovers some very coincidentally important news articles and cassette tapes in the attic and finds out the caretaker of the cabin was an employee of the asylum, and not a nice one, either. But she also finds out that the boy we saw earlier, Ned (who’s been popping up as a ghost in the cabin) has a separate personality/demonic evil side that likes to punish people who lie.

Punish them by yanking out their tongues.

I wish I could recommend this movie. It’s got an interesting premise that held the promise of a righteously bloody good time. Unfortunately, it meanders way too much on its unsuspenseful leisure way to an illogical twist that kind of comes out of nowhere. It should have left me chilled, but it just left me cold.

If you’re interested, the surprisingly interesting and well-done trailer is right here.