Different, but plot and acting do not live up to the cinematography

Rating: 5/10 (14 September 2015)

It's good to see a movie which is clearly made by a team that still sees cinema as an art form, rather than nothing more than a cynical way to part people from their money. The presentation is spooky, weird, and atmospheric; the music -- although not something I would listen to other than as a film soundtrack -- is a good fit to the 80s-style dystopian environment in which the action takes place . The film is mostly not outright scary, but it was tense and creepy. I was willing to forgive it a great deal.
In the end, though, it didn't convince me, because the plot isn't even internally consistent, the characters do not behave in a credible way, and the acting isn't compelling enough to conceal these facts. Now, I'm not a complete reactionary, and I accept that a convincing story can be told without adhering to a real-world, linear-time narrative. But the story does have to hold at least to the basic premises of the fantastical world in which it is played out; characters have to behave in a way that is at least broadly recognizable as compatible with human nature.
Yet here we have a woman who is cynically induced into a sexual relationship so that her partner can pass on a 'curse' to her. You might expect that, when these characters meet again, there will at least be harsh words, if not violence. And yet the woman and her friends -- who in any real-world scenario would be spitting mad -- seem not to realize that they're dealing with an exploitative, wicked man. Later they casually discuss the possibility of female lead's passing on the curse in the same way, with no obvious interest in the ethical implications. Real folks just don't behave in the way this film portrays them -- not even teenagers. The characters are young people with homes and parents, and yet neither homes nor parents feature in the story, even in situations where we might reasonably expect them to, given the way in which they are portrayed.
The monster, or demon, or whatever it is, can clearly transport itself over large distances by non-physical means, yet cannot cope with a locked door. In the vicinity of the victim, it can't seem to move faster than a shamble, and yet it can climb onto a roof. It changes form unpredictably in a surreal, nightmare-like way, yet it has a physical presence and interacts with characters other than those subject to the curse, even though they cannot see it. Movie monsters don't have to obey real-world limitations, of course, but they do have to behave in ways that are self-consistent, and compatible at least with the laws of physics as they are interpreted in the fantasy world created by the story. The Terminator, for example, can withstand a shotgun blast, but the human characters don't have to worry that it can teleport or read their minds, because that would be inconsistent with the story as it is told. The "It," however, has no character or properties that make sense even in the film's own world.
I did not expect a happy ending to this film, but I did expect _an_ ending. However, it appears if the writer just wrote a bunch of spooky scenes and then ran out of ideas. I felt that the picture could have just faded to black at any point in the last 30 minutes, and it would have made no difference.
In summary, a nicely-made, atmospheric movie, badly let down because the writer did not seem to know whether he was describing a sequence of events that took place in some world, albeit possibly a fantastical one, or a nightmare with no logic or consistency at all.