Pet shop owner and veterinary student Ben Adams (Matt Whelan) is surprised to learn that he has inherited a house from his estranged late mother. He travels with his wife Jules (Luciane Buchanan) and daughter Reia (Zara Nausbaum) to the Oregon town of Hobbit’s Bay, and discovers an abandoned two-story house, overgrown by the forest, and close to the Pacific Coast. As they begin to renovate the house, it becomes clear that something is amiss. Strange sounds in the night, and a creepy underground water tank, lead Ban and Jules to a shocking discovery.

The Tank is a new b-grade horror film from writer/director Scott Walker. It comes a decade after Walker’s debut feature, the Nicolas Cage-led Frozen Ground. It is never fun to describe a film as ‘by the numbers’, but it is an accurate label to pin here. An isolated house with a terrible secret, a mystery of long-vanished family members, things going bump in the night – there is little here that audiences will find particularly fresh or innovative. That does not mean the film is necessarily bad, per se, but it does seem to be something for genre enthusiasts rather than more discriminating viewers.

To his credit, Walker keeps the nature of the film’s horrors out of reach for a long time. There are plenty of hints and suggestions, but nothing is seen or revealed until the climax. Before that point, whatever lurks beneath the house could be anything – ghosts, vampires, Cthulhoid monsters – and there is satisfaction to be had in trying to outguess the film before the true antagonists are revealed. I suspect some may find the build-up a little too slow. To my mind it is patient and measured; a very different thing to being boring.

If anything the film’s climax is disappointing, as by necessity it shuts down all of the enticing possibilities bar one – and that choice is well shot and edited, but not perhaps the most interesting of Walker’s options. Credit to the visual effects team from WETA, who appear to be working with physical elements rather than CGI. It gives everything a charming old-fashioned feel.

The lead cast are rock-solid, and technically the picture is attractively presented. The film’s central problem is not that it does anything wrong, but simply that it fails to bring anything particularly new. We have seen this film before, in slight variations, but certainly in more interesting ways. The Tank is solid, but unremarkable.