I’m fascinated by the culture and psychology of cults. How can anyone be fooled so completely by the grandiose, groundless claims of charismatic charlatans? How can they be conned into giving up their families, jobs, possessions, their entire lives in the service of such transparently false beliefs? How can they be made to do such horrible, pointless things?

Believer, while about a cult (sort of), does not attempt to answer any of these questions. It follows Kate, a young woman working on a book about mass murderer Marshall Grayson, a philosophy professor-turned-cult-leader who, with the aid of his followers, has killed more than fifty people. (It isn’t clear if that number includes his followers, who commit suicide after each murder, or not.) As she sits in the courtroom audience on the day of Grayson’s sentencing, the cult leader, who is blind, somehow senses Kate’s presence and attacks her. He jumps on her, knocking her to the ground, and whispers something in her ear. She blacks out, waking up in a hospital three days later, and much of the rest of the film is spun out slowly revealing what Grayson said to her. After the attack, Kate goes to her sister Michelle’s house to recuperate, and the requisite creepy stuff starts happening. Is Kate now one of Grayson’s faithful? Is his apocalyptic prophecy actually true? Is that a Frank Lloyd Wright house where ¾ of the film takes place and which we are forced to look at, again and again, in the large number of exterior establishing shots? We may never know the answers to at least two of these questions.

In common with 90% of the horror genre, Believer focuses on the increasingly spooky events swirling around its main character. For example, Kate sees a person lurking in the shadows of her hospital room, only to realize when the nurse walks in moments later that no one is there. Later, at her sister’s house, the usually friendly family dog attacks her. Also in common with much of the genre, the people around the protagonist rapidly start to doubt her sanity. At every beat, the film feels extremely familiar, even as the plot lacks specific dramatic moments to grab onto and identify as important, as progressing toward something identifiable or at least meaningful. There also don’t seem to be significant stakes here. We don’t get a chance to know the characters enough to care about them or any threats to their wellbeing. There are no stand-out performances that could help build rapport or lend urgency to the events; everyone seems to be rather tiredly delivering their lines, as if filming happened exclusively at the end of already-long days. The telegraphed fast-noise-quick-edit jump scares are almost distractions, except it’s not clear what they’re distracting from.

Believer ultimately feels unfinished, though not in the sense of some mechanical part of the filmmaking process being incomplete: the editing is solid, the cinematography is polished (with the exception of those uninspired jump scares). But the story feels very hollow and simply dangles there, a kind of vestigial thing, not only unresolved but not even really adequately introduced. It would have been much better served were it cut down to an hour and introduced as the pilot of a network series that combined courtroom/police procedural drama with occult elements. Over the course of a television season, there would be the promise of more details about how we got to this moment, and a clearer picture of the consequences of what we’ve seen so far (if not a true resolution). The history of the larger cult, of Grayson’s role and the apocalyptic prophecy that motivated him, of Kate’s family…all of that could be sussed out in episodic format. But as it is, it just doesn’t really go anywhere.