A university student (Emily Blunt) hitches a ride with a classmate (Ashton Holmes) for a car ride through the mountains – only for events to go horribly awry. There is more to Wind Chill, a 2007 thriller directed by Gregory Jacobs, but in all honesty there is not a lot more. If you want to remain entirely ignorant of the film’s events it is probably best to finish up this paragraph and leave it at that. It is sufficient to note that the film is unexceptional, that Emily Blunt is reasonably good in it, and that it owes a heavy tonal debt to author Stephen King.

The one particularly bold choice in Wind Chill is that the film begins playing by the rules of a particular kind of thriller, but then slowly transforms into a complete different kind. It is unfortunate that neither kind is expressed with any specific flair or invention, but it does keep the viewer on their toes for at least a little while.

To be honest the first half feels more serviceable and promising. The anonymous protagonist – she never gets a name – agrees to a rideshare with a stranger, only to slowly realise he has not been truthful about himself. What is more, he appears to know a lot more about her than he initially presents. An early scene at a roadhouse suggests some kind of conspiratorial plot akin to Jonathan Mostow’s Breakdown (1997). It all feels rather generic, but Blunt and Holmes make it at least watchable.

It is when the car is driven off the road into the snow that Wind Chill begins to shift into its true form, and sadly this second version of the film is awkward and unsatisfying. Supernatural forces are at work, including an ominous group of priests and a spectral 1950s police officer. It is an interesting idea to shift from thriller to supernatural horror, but the idea is executed too poorly to be satisfying. For one thing, the ghostly elements simply are not scary. For another, the screenplay – by Joe Gangemi and Steven A. Katz – pushes too far into the psychological thriller to easily pull its way back out. It turns out that the rideshare driver has been following the protagonist and learning all about her habits, routines, and food preferences. He hopes to turn the shared ride into a romantic exercise. He is manipulating her into a relationship.

This is all deeply toxic and problematic behaviour, but the requirements of the supernatural horror mean the audience is expected to trust and like the driver during the second half of the film. His dialogue is delivered in a way that implies we should feel sorry for him – or even like him – and coming after the first half this simply is not easily done.

There is a sort of cod-Stephen King kind of horror laid over Wind Chill, but it feels messy and unfocused. The back story is complicated enough to require being expressed via information dump. The final scenes pull towards one particular ending before retreating to a kind of banal ‘safety’. What elements feel good felt better in other movies.