Imagine if Halle Berry told you the world had just ended and you had to live out in the woods. Also, you had to stay in Halle Berry’s house or an evil force would come for you. And when you leave, you had to be tied to Halle Berry’s house with a rope or evil would come for you – again. Also, only Halle Berry can see evil. Oh, and the protective power of Halle Berry’s house has to be charged like a battery, with your love, so she has to repeatedly lock you in the basement with the lights off until you give off the right vibes.

That’s the premise of Alexandre Aja’s horror thriller All We Had to Give, and when you think about it, it’s a pretty crazy way to tell a story about belief. Scary movies like All We Had to Give and Knock at the Cabin are close personal cousins ​​to family films like Miracle on 34th Street and Harvey. In every single one of them, the characters – and the audience – are asked to believe something unbelievable. If it’s a delusion, what does that say about the people who believed it? If it’s real, what does that say about the people who didn’t?

In Everything We Want, Berry plays Mama, a woman who lives alone in the woods with her two young sons, Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins, The Man Who Died) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey). Her children believe all the bizarre and horrifying things their mother tells them, because why shouldn’t they? All they know is that you can’t leave the house unless you’re physically tied to it. That’s their reality.

As an audience, however, we can’t help but notice some serious warning signs. Nolan has reached a strange age and is also starting to have doubts. When he accidentally sleepwalks out of the house in the middle of the night, without a protective magic rope, nothing happens. He has been led to believe that an evil force is attacking him, but if that doesn’t happen, does that mean his mother isn’t telling the truth? Can she really see demonic spirits, which would be a serious problem, or does she have other, equally serious problems? And if she’s not well, what can be done about it?

It’s easy to get distracted by the ideology behind a film like All We Had to Give because Alexandre Aja gives us a lot of time to think about it. A lot of All We Had to Give is about the family simply surviving in the wild. Sometimes they argue. Sometimes they have to eat tree bark when they can’t catch animals. It takes a long time for the plot to actually pick up steam, and until then we’re expected to just watch and wonder if we’re supposed to believe it all. After a while, all you can do is throw up your hands and wait patiently, because until All We Had to Give actually puts its cards on the table and confirms whether it’s about the power or dangers of belief – in religion or, more directly, in our parents – we (ironically) don’t have much to hold onto.

The script by Kevin Coughlin and Ryan Grassby (“Mean Dreams”) gives Aja plenty of strange imagery to play with, and cinematographer Maxime Alexandre (“Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City”) makes the desolation, shadowy rooms, thorny woods and grim – possibly real – ghosts an eerie picture. Love and distrust are also woven into the story, giving Berry, Jenkins and Daggs plenty of tense, juicy scenes full of character and emotion. Berry has a wiry energy that, depending on how each scene is modulated, is recognizable as either a sleepless, overanxious mother or a wicked, evil witch. Jenkins and Daggs, impressive performers who seem desperate and tormented, are her perfect match.

But this material lives and dies by how it turns out, and it’s rude to give away a film’s ending, but suffice it to say that All We Had to Give ends on a frustrating note. The climax reaches dramatic heights, there’s no doubt about that, but what it has to say about literally everything we’ve just seen is frustratingly elusive. It’s a film that wants to have its cake, eat its cake, ruminate its cake and eat the cake again. And when it’s all over, it claims it still has cake, but by that point we’ve just watched them do so much weirdly noncommittal stuff with cake that it’s hard to care anymore.

Everything We Do promises to be a scary and challenging film about belief in evil, belief in one’s parents, belief in one’s parents’ beliefs, and belief in what we can actually prove, but that promise is only half fulfilled. Aja’s eerie direction and truly excellent cast elevate the material to higher levels, but they can only take the story so far because it’s – ironically (again) – tied to a frustrating history.

Never Let Go tries to do everything and ends up accomplishing very little. It may freak you out a little, and that may be enough for some people, but it only briefly captures something meaningful. Then it lets go.

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