There are few movies I can recall that are more style than substance than Gretel & Hansel, the title-flipping new sort-of horror movie from director Oz Perkins. Don’t worry that you’ve never heard of him – even though IMDb credits him as an actor, director, and writer, the only thing on that list that you might have seen is the 2009 Star Trek, which of course he didn’t direct but instead played the role of “Enterprise Communications Officer.”

The real problem I think Perkins and writer Rob Hayes (who has an even less impressive resume) faced was that the source material is so light. If you think you know the whole story of Hansel and Gretel, it’s because you do: Wikipedia’s plot summary is barely over 500 words.

So how does one go about adapting a story that can be related in a few minutes into a feature-length film? You could of course go the obvious route and add characters and storylines. Or you could instead decide to keep the story basically as-is and instead fill the extra 80 minutes of screen time developing the mood.

This movie is almost nonstop, wall-to-wall world building. There’s a long introductory sequence about how the witch came to be evil, but that does not so much establish the character as establish the dark, moody overtones of the movie, with the overly saturated scenes of the forest and creepy things appearing that may or may not be there.

We then jump forward some indeterminate amount of time to find Gretel (the names in the title are flipped because there is no question that this is Gretel’s story), played by It‘s Sophia Lillis, walking to a job interview with her little brother Hansel, played by Sammy Leakey (and, just as a side note: don’t take your brother to job interviews).

Gretel is trying to be a maid for some old rich dude, but even in this world where everything is creepy all the time, rich old dude is too creepy, and so she decides that she’d rather have her and her family starve. So she returns home but is soon kicked out of the house by her, wait for it, creepy mother, and so the two kids decide the logical thing to do is to go wander through the forest.

They spend a few creepy nights walking through the creepy woods, squat in some creepy house before being rescued from a creepy monster by a rather nice gentleman hunter, who soon enough kicks them out to continue their wandering through Creepyville.

You know the rest, assuming someone told you at least one fairy tale at some point in your life. They finally come to a creepy cottage where an old woman invites them in to a massive feast, but then it turns out to be not what it seems and bad stuff ensues.

All of that doesn’t sound so bad, and if there had been some decent character building or action scenes along the way, the movie might have worked. But instead, the characters and dialogue seem to constantly be getting in the way when the filmmakers really just want to remind you of something: This world is creepy. Oh so very, very creepy! See that thing over there? Creepy. And that thing? CREEPY. Oh, and here’s a totally unnecessary jump scare because that’s what happens in creepy movies!

I spent a decent part of the movie wondering where exactly it’s supposed to take place (because you will spent a lot of time watching this movie thinking about other things). The costumes and setting imply 19th century New England, a hypothesis supported by the fact the Lillis never attempts anything other than her normal American accent. But then we meet the witch, played most of the time by Alice Krige, who has a thick Irish accent. Things aren’t further illuminated by Leakey, who switches accents more often than Carrie Fisher in A New Hope. So in the end, we have no idea where it takes place, other than somewhere creepy.

It’s rare that style over substance is a thing worth seeing, and this movie certainly isn’t an exception. I would normally say that the movie’s saving grace is that it is short – clocking in at a mere 87 minutes – but it feels much, much longer than that. There are movies twice that length that I’d happily sit through again over having to watch Gretel & Hansel again.