The conceit of “the following is based on true events” is so trite and passé that if you’re bringing it to the table, you’d better bring something worthwhile alongside it. The better “found footage” films, such as The Blair Witch Project, [REC], Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity overcame this with a unique form and a compelling set of thrills, but The Fourth Kind, the latest pseudo-true thriller, makes the viewer feel as though they just tripped over this artistic contrivance by accident, because the rest of the film is so woefully routine.

Milla Jovovich appears at the start of the film as herself, declaring that the film has sought to recreate camera and audio recordings procured during the year 2000 of Dr. Abigail Tyler and her patients as they attempt to get to the bottom of some rather strange occurrences in the sleepy Alaskan town of Nome. The trailer, and this opening scene, provides some hope that The Fourth Kind is going to have some fun with a postmodern concept, but sadly director Olatunde Osunsanmi takes the easy way out, and we have the most procedural execution possible, using an almost-clever concept to mask a painfully by-the-books plot.

In placing the “real” recordings of Tyler alongside Jovovich’s performance, Osunsanmi tries to draw attention away from how boring the story actually is; she finds that several of her patients are reporting seeing an owl outside their window, and things go from bad to worse as one of her patients kills himself and his family, and so she decides to try and get to the bottom of this before anyone else gets hurt. The problem is that there’s no intrigue; the film sits around side-stepping the juicy bits we’ve already seen in the trailer, and rather perfunctorily throws in a dodgy family plot, where Tyler has a deaf daughter and a son who resents her after their father’s death. We all know that the owl these people are talking about is an alien, but the film doesn’t arrive at this conclusion until the halfway point, making this a pretty snoozy outing for the most part.

The only real scene of interest up to this point involves one of Tyler’s patients holding his family hostage, and we see numerous different angles of the event in various 24-style cutaway boxes, but even the style here is cumbersome; the dividing black lines between the boxes are irritating and keep shifting direction, although at least here they do so to emphasise whoever is speaking, whereas most of the time the line just wavers around for absolutely no reason.

It is only when Jovovich shares the screen with either Elias Koteas or Will Patton that things are at all interesting or coherent; Koteas plays Abel Campos, a sceptical colleague, while Patton is the film’s real point of interest as Sheriff August, a cop who believes that Tyler herself may be behind the disappearances and strange happenings in Nome. When Tyler and August get into a shouting match about the murder-suicide, the film is at its best, but these points are too brief and can hardly be said to salvage things.

And thus it’s a shame that The Fourth Kind actually has some decent performances, because they are utterly wasted here, with dull material that’s totally unexciting and laboured. Subtlety and the notion of “what you don’t see is scarier” totally works if sufficient atmosphere has been built prior to the scares, but there’s nothing you can’t yawn your way through here, and for those curious, you don’t get anything more than a blurry shot of some dark figures coming into a bedroom. The film’s conceit actually begins to work against itself in the latter portions, as we witness grainy video footage of thinks actually kicking off, but at the exciting moment, the footage distorts and we’re left to ponder what has happened. With style, this can be aptly terrifying, if glimpses are given, but here we get virtually nothing; a light glance of a dark UFO-like shape, lots of screaming, but sadly nothing approximating suspense or tension.

In its final few minutes, The Fourth Kind finally manages to intrigue, with an interesting mystery left up in the air and some interesting musings on God, but it’s all too late for a film that spends the majority of its runtime poring over boring details and a painful family subplot. Jovovich et al deserve better, and despite their solid efforts, this is a stupefyingly tedious, not-so-close encounter that just about scrapes unintentional amusement, but can’t even satisfy in that regard.