Producers: Luke Daniels, Greg Lauritano, Sophie Turner, Lucas Jarach, Natasha Kermani, Adam G. Simon, Bull Blumenthal and Patrick Hibler   Director: Natasha Kermani   Screenplay: Natasha Kermani   Cast: Sophie Turner, Kit Harington, Marcia Gay Harden, Laurence O’Fuarain, Jonathan Howard, Zachary Cohen, Tigerlily Langford, Huxley Sheppard, Steve Jacobs and Catherine McDonough   Distributor: Lionsgate

Grade: C-

It takes a lot of chutzpah to title your film “The Dreadful,” and although Natasha Kermani’s early-modern horror tale doesn’t quite live down to the appellation, it comes devilishly close.  Heavy on mood and thin on plot, Kermani’s follow-up to her misguided Dracula story “Abraham’s Boys” is equally tedious.

Set in a remote coastal area of England (the shoot was in Cornwall), presumably during the fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses, the story revolves around a cursed knight’s helmet that’s introduced in a prologue as feeding on envy and violence.  But it switches immediately to the poor thatched cottage, fashioned by production designers Errol Jarc and Kelly Toode (the latter also the costumer), where Anne (Sophie Turner), a pious lass, lives a hardscrabble life with her mother-in-law Morwen (Marcia Gay Harden); both await the return of Anne’s husband Seamus (Laurence O’Fuarain), who’s off fighting.  Meanwhile they regularly attend the services conducted by the local priest (Steve Jacobs).

Their hopes are dashed, however, when their neighbor Jago (Kit Harington) returns from battle alone, with news of Seamus’ death, though he’s cagey about the details.  Anne, who’s already witnessed a vision of Seamus in pain, is distressed, but it’s Morwen who takes the news most to heart, fearing abandonment by her daughter-in-law.  It’s not an implausible concern, since Jago has been infatuated with Anne since he was a boy (Zachary Cohen), when he played with her (Tigerlily Langford) and Seamus (Huxley Sheppard) but, being pintsized, was always dominated by the bigger boy.  And Anne has watched neighbor Kayna (Catherine McDonough) give birth to a son and is consumed by a wish to be a mother as well.

The uncertainty about the future spurs Morwen to action.  She bad-mouths Jago, who, to be fair, seems a rather untrustworthy sort with his habit of calling her a hag while stalking Anne.  She also scours the coast for shipwrecked sailors, stealing their purses and even killing them if necessary to do so, and her murderous impulses extend to a friar (Jonathan Howard) who stops by one afternoon (in fairness, he does seem a pretty awful fellow, trying to sell fake relics) and their aged pastor as well.  (His Latin, to be fair, wasn’t all that bad.)           

All of which doesn’t stop Anne from taking up with Jago, even as she’s terrified by a mysterious knight who’s come into the area, wearing that horrible helmet.  Eventually Morwen will see him too, and she follows him with malicious intent as he watches Anne and Jago together.

Kermani manages to tie the various plot threads together in the end, but not very satisfactorily, and the closing shot, meant to convey tension about what might happen next, instead elicits dread about whether a sequel is being considered. 

But while the pacing of “The Dreadful” is terribly slow (Gabriel de Urioste and Jeff Betancourt share the editing credit), it remains an atmospheric watch, with Jarc and Toode’s efforts set off (along with the impressive locations, often shot from above as a transitional device) by Julia Swain’s widescreen cinematography and accompanied by Jamal Green’s unnerving score.

As to the cast, they’re variable.  Tucker’s mostly placid, thoroughly modern portrayal—Anne is, after all, in the end a proto-feminist figure—is kind of dull, but Harden brings a ferocity to Morwen that livens things up.  Harington is puzzlingly off-kilter, seizing on Jago’s humming as a defining character trait, along with his habit of spitting in Morwen’s direction.  But then he’s meant to be enigmatic.  The “Rashomon”-like treatment afforded Seamus leaves O’Fuarain pretty much stranded.

Give Kermani credit for trying to do something different.  But different doesn’t necessarily equate with good.