After Cocaine Bear, this isn't the first horror film starring Keri Russell living in deep rural woodland, but it has a much more serious concept and approach. At least most of the time, it's an intelligent and even slightly heartfelt horror flick, like something Stephen King might have written by mixing real people who have real lives with an otherworldly monster.

Russell is Julia, a schoolteacher in a small, depressed mining/logging town in the northwest where the main economic activity is cooking meth. She's quiet and stoic, living with her brother, the newly minted sheriff Paul (Jesse Plemons) and trying to get on with her life after some trauma.

Julia's fraught and slightly nervous, not having been back home very long and with whatever happened to her only hinted at for most of the movie. She gets along with her brother but there's some past resentment there which comes out eventually despite how supportive the pair try to be for each other.

While she tries to heal and reconnect with her childhood home, Julia finds herself concerned about a student in her class, Lucas (Jeremy Thomas), who's skittish and keeps to himself, classic signs of the abuse she herself suffered.

But the truth is far more awful than she can imagine. We've already seen Lucas' scumbag dad Frank and a pal of his steal into the disused mine where they operate their drug den, and after they hear something angry in the darkness the pair flee, neither one making it back out after apparently being attacked by some creature.

Now, Lucas keeps his father and little brother locked in the attic while he takes care of himself, the pair of them transforming into something not human.

But Julia no sooner raises her concerns about the kid than the bloodshed starts when the remains of Frank's scumbag partner are found in the woods, half eaten. At Julia's urging, the principal (Amy Madigan) visits the house, breaking into the attic to investigate the alarming noises and falling victim to whatever Frank's turned into.

What whatever that is now loose, victims pile up even faster, Paul overwhelmed by the onslaught and with few avenues to turn to apart from his friend – the former sheriff and a native American (which gives you your first clue about the creature's identity).

Until the climactic duel with the CGI beast, it's mostly an exercise in slightly elevated horror, the abuse Julia was victim to and which she suspects is still going with the little boy on the emotional backbone of the story.

But when she enters the mine to try and rescue the now-missing Lucas, the movie has nowhere to go apart from turning her into a scream queen, pitting her against a badly lit and not-terribly visually interesting monster.

Not only that, it abandons everything it's spent the whole film setting up – after being portrayed as a much more dangerous foe swooping down on victims and giving them no chance – even laying waste to a shed Paul is hiding in and badly injuring him – Julia manages to hold it off and eventually kill it with a sharpened stick.

It does a good job with the allegory, performance and emotional quotient of what the characters are going through, it just isn't interested enough in the monster mash horror elements to make them stand out enough, and it ultimately fails to come together successfully using either.