What starts out as an evocative murder mystery tinged with gothic fantasy quickly devolves into a meandering bloodbath in the second half of Horns, Alexandre Aja’s dark thriller starring Harry-Potter-no-more Daniel Radcliffe. Radcliffe plays Ig Perrish, young resident of a sleepy mountain town who is besotted in love with his childhood sweetheart Merrin (the very good—and very beautiful—Juno Temple). One rainy night, Merrin tearfully tells Ig she’s leaving him, and a fight ensues. The next morning, he wakes to discover that his love has been ghastly murdered in the woods, and soon, giant horns start to inexplicably grow from his head. Add to that his newfound ability to draw the deepest and darkest truths from those to whom he speaks, and the stage is set for an eerie investigation into what really happened.

Unfortunately, the deeper he digs, the closer the film gets to been-there-done-that teen soapiness territory. Additionally, the filmmakers were perhaps not counting on the fact that this is already the second dark fairytale featuring a horned protagonist this year to explore the boundaries between good and evil. The last was Maleficent as played artfully by Angelina Jolie, and while Horns delves deeper than the previous film’s basic rape metaphor plot structure, both films deal with revenge and the pull between our ever-changing inclinations.

The classic Depeche Mode and Bowie-infused mood of Horns is welcome, however, and some of the inside jokes help keep things fun: The first line of dialog is “Are you horny?” and Ig’s brother, played by Joe Anderson, is a jazz horn player. But things get so convoluted and bleak that Ig’s horns become entirely beside the point, and the gratuitous violence late in the film does nothing but shock in how different it feels from the general tone. Finally, Daniel Radcliffe’s accent is spot on, as is much of his performance. But his strangely dispassionate and generic voice over doesn’t help an ultimately thankless film.

2 out of 5 bubbles