The Quiet Ones is trapped in an unusual space between the traditional Hammer horror pedigree and the inclination of virtually every modern American horror film of the past decade to scream at the audience real loud a lot of times, as though the film were desperate to rouse you from slumber. A possession tale tinged with the female hysteria panic of prior decades, it’s a fairly average horror flick with some effective atmospherics that’s unfortunately hampered by the apparent lingering urge to turn into a 90-minute haunted house after a while.

For a while, though, The Quiet Ones brings some intriguing tweaks to the beyond-rote possession horror subgenre. Loosely based on a real-life 1972 experiment in Toronto, the film joins Prof. Joseph Coupland (Jared Harris) in the middle of his work in 1974 with Jane Harper (Olivia Cooke), an emotionally distraught young woman who believes herself to be possessed by a figure named Evey. Coupland, a skeptic, aims to cure Jane of what he believes is a mental illness triggered by repression, believing that such a breakthrough could herald the end of mental illness altogether. Aided by Brian (Sam Claflin from Catching Fire), a young cameraman, and a pair of student volunteers, Coupland subjects Jane to sleep deprivation, hypnosis, séances, and all other manner of unorthodox methods. Because this is a Hammer film, they do all this in a well-appointed Victorian home in the countryside, where bad things start happening in no short order.

At its best, The Quiet Ones makes effective use of the psychosexual and mentally abusive underpinnings at its center. Jane’s condition is called into question rather frequently throughout, and as the film progresses the intentions of every member of the research team get foggier. Claflin fares well enough as the innocent young man thrust into an increasingly bizarre and life-threatening scenario, as does Harris as his increasingly unstable mentor, but the real star of the film is Cooke. She manages to take Jane beyond the typical greasy-haired picture of fragility that often pops up in movies like this. Her total lucidity in the face of encroaching darkness gives the film a far scarier tint than it may have found otherwise, and her girlish sexuality leads the film down some darker and less-trodden roads.

However, after a while, The Quiet Ones starts casting aside those subtler notes, to the film’s general detriment. There are a lot of slamming doors and faces suddenly appearing in the center of the frame, accentuated by an incredibly loud sound mix that makes the film’s jump scares explode in a way that’s refreshing for about 5-10 minutes and increasingly grating beyond that. The film also ends in disappointing fashion, diving headlong into tropes after teasing a fresher approach early on. (It’s sad how redundant nefarious markings seared into flesh have become as of late.) There are touches of nervy psychological tension throughout, but ultimately The Quiet Ones is yet another entry into the canon of movies that function more as haunted houses than as films, wringing out startled gasps as often as it can.