_Mercy Black_ is like a black and white water color on glass: there's isn't a solid foundation to show us clearly what to to fear. Because the mythology of the entity isn't developed at the outset, whenever they trot out her tired old bones, we don't know what it was is we're supposed to be afraid of. It's a ghost story with no story, no goal for the protagonist to fight for so as it's a tale with no direction, it goes nowhere.

Based on the Slender Man true crime story (two 12-year-old girls lured their friend into the woods and stabbed her 19 times [she would survive] in order to prove that the fictitious Slender Man spirit really existed), _Mercy Black_ (the name of the film's version of Slender Man) picks up the story 15 years later, when one of the young perpetrators is released from the mental hospital.

After that the film becomes a series of jump scares, shocks that are just nightmares, random deaths to keep us aware, some WTFs that made me literally laugh out loud, and a surprise ending that surprised me by how little I cared. In the hit and miss Blumhouse horror catalog, _Mercy Black_ will fall in the former.