If you were to make your moviegoing decisions based upon reviews you’d likely haven’t seen Sylvain White’s Slender Man.

And that’s okay because it’s not a terribly good movie. The antagonist–Slender Man itself (a character Angus Scrimm did much better in the Phantasm movies pre-Internet meme) is a cypher in that you have no idea why or how it does what it does.

Better written movies can get away with not revealing important details about characters because there’s likely enough going on that the exclusion creates an air of mystery,

Or even anticipation.

Here you’re left wondering why things are unfolding as they do, which ends up frustrating more than anything else.

Though that’s not quite fair in that you do know to an extent why things unfold as they do though when it’s likely because better movies–The Ring and to a lesser extent, A Nightmare On Elm Street–did if first.

Which proves, if nothing else, that sometimes critics are right.