A young American artist (Dakota Fanning) finds herself stranded in a vast forest in western Ireland and stalked by huge, murderous, mostly unseen monsters. She takes shelter with three other (highly under-written) stalkees in an eerie concrete bunker with one glass side. Like a cage in a zoo. See, the thingies come out at night to, well, watch.

Now I’m going to give you a minute to put all that together and guess the director. Monsters? Unseen? Eerie? If you guessed M. Night Shayamalan, you’d be half right. For this is made by his daughter Ishana.

Since it’s her debut flick, we’ll reserve judgement. It shows that she can put a creature feature together. But like her dad’s stuff, it starts strong, then gets dull fast under its obligation to explain, in detail, its spooky scenario. It’s soulless and derivative, and the obligatory “twist” ending is particularly unsatisfying.

One can’t help but hope that Ishana steps outside her dad’s increasingly ineffective shadow for her next one. (102 min)