'The Unborn' delivers predictable mystic hokum

Considering that "The Unborn" comes from David S. Goyer, the screenwriter behind 2008's gripping blockbuster "The Dark Knight," the supernatural shocker is a disappointment.

Considering that it's a rare horror flick that delves into the dark side of the Kabbalah, "The Unborn" is an utter waste of potential.

Goyer also directed, and he set the movie in Chicago and a number of suburban spots including Mundelein, Libertyville and Melrose Park. Local audiences will undoubtedly find it more engaging to play "spot that location" than to follow Goyer's episodic labyrinth of mystical hokum.

Casey (Odette Yustman of "Cloverfield") is a somnambulant college student haunted by her mother's suicide, as well as a series of spooky dreams and visions that center on a dog, a buried fetus and a spooky little boy (St. Charles' Ethan Cutkosky).

Soon, Casey develops a fear of mirrors, and her eyes begin to turn an unnatural shade of blue. A boy she baby-sits starts acting mean, and then his baby sister dies. Bugs suddenly appear everywhere, even inside fresh eggs and through a malevolent peephole in a dance club restroom stall.

It's lucky that everyone in Casey's life (her friends, her father, her doctor) seems to exist merely to wander in, spout some superstitious or obscure info and help the film's heroine piece together the source of her troubling apparitions.

The methodically doled out clues point to an elderly Holocaust survivor named Sofi (Jane Alexander, once an Oscar nominee for 1971's "The Great White Hope"), who seems to have been significant to Casey's late mother, and who lives in a nursing home with security so lax, visitors are free to wander inside well after midnight.

It doesn't spoil Goyer's incredibly convoluted plot to reveal that Casey's dilemma involves twins, Nazi experiments and a dybbuk, a malicious possessing spirit found in Jewish mythology, nor that she eventually enlists a rabbi ("Dark Knight" vet Gary Oldman) and a priest (Idris Elba of "The Wire") to banish the evil presence.

As a cinematic baddie, the dybbuk is historically untapped, and since it most resembles the vengeful spook you've already seen a thousand Asian horror flicks, it remains so in "The Unborn." Too bad. It's an interesting beast, and deserves more than the standard startles that lead up to this movie's predictable "twist" ending.

"The Unborn"

Starring: Odette Yustman, Gary Oldman, Ethan Cutkosky, Cam Gigandet, Meagan Good, Idris Elba

Directed by: David S. Goyer

Other: A Rogue Pictures release. Rated PG-13. 87 minutes