Upon receiving Those Who Walk Away, my response was the rather childlike glee I always feel when I read the words ‘haunted house’ in the brief description. I resisted the urge to jump up and down doing superfast little claps and made myself save it for later, when I’d got all my daily to-do’s out of the way and could settle down with it uninterrupted. Happily this also coincided with the time of day my internet behaves itself best (1.30AM for the curious; I truly am a creature of the night).

Max (Booboo Stewart) and Avery (Scarlett Sperduto) are on their first date after meeting via a social media app. Off they pop downtown, where Max experiences one or two rather baffling Dali-esque events. As a lifelong fan of the surreal this is something I’d ordinarily welcome, but here I was simply left puzzled as their addition didn’t appear to amount to anything.

At Avery’s suggestion, the pair end up at a local haunted house, allegedly the home of a sinister creature with urban legend-style status. Ok, I thought. I’m normally more a ghost rather than monster fan, but still; looks good and creepy. Creaking staircase, noises from shadowy corners; thumbs-up so far.

The actors play their roles in a rather caricatured fashion I found hard to take; Avery’s wild and weird tough-girl persona and Max’s awkwardly shy over-cautiousness became a bit tiresome very early on. The acting’ in Those Who Walk Away isn’t bad, just a little overplayed; Max is a bit of a hero-but-doesn’t-know-it-yet type; socially awkward and sweetly naive, unwittingly finding himself in a situation that eventually allows him to reveal his true mettle. Avery is Little Ms. Cryptic; full of dark secrets she hints at in a vaguely offhand way until the two are finally inside the house.

There the vague uncertainty of the story continues with random clues as to the nature of the monster that supposedly lurks within. There’s evidence of habitation by children in the form of drawings of the beast, and the place has the appearance of being vacated not all that long ago. Before too long we discover the truth behind the story so far; well, sort of.

Whilst the entity does appear and do the standard creaturely things expected, there’s no real backstory as to its origin, reason for being there in the first place, or its rather cringeworthy name (I’ll let you find that out for yourselves).

While it’s not a terrible film by any standards, I couldn’t help feeling Those Who Walk Away unnecessarily took on too much at once, including numerous disjointed, unanswered questions that didn’t need asking to begin with. For me, cleaning out most of these cryptic cobwebs and shifting the focus more onto the main aspects of the story (those surrounding the creature for starters) would have improved it greatly.

I did wonder once or twice while searching for answers to the presence and purpose of the monster whether it was symbolic of abuse suffered by the children who once lived there (without being a spoiler there’s more than one reference to children in the house as monster fodder). If this was indeed the case it was only by clutching at the flimsiest of straws that I considered it.

All that being said, Those Who Walk Away isn’t a shabbily-made film at all, and the cinematography is first-class; proof that less is more where there’s clearly (as there is here) plenty of talent involved.

4 out of 10 Monsters in the Closet