British import Hollow cashes in on the found footage revival kicked off at least in part by 2009’s Paranormal Activity, telling the story of a quartet of friends who suffer a dark turn of events in a remote village in Suffolk, England that’s been haunted for centuries by a local legend. Solid, largely naturalistic performances and a nice technical package help offset a story whose bump-in-the-night eerieness reaches a certain level of diminishing return long before the end of its 95-minute running time, rendering Hollow a marginal recommendation for hardcore genre enthusiasts.

On holiday, Emma (Emily Plumtree) and James (Sam Stockman), freshly engaged, pile into their car with Scott (Matt Stokoe), Emma’s best friend since childhood. They pick up Lynne (Jessica Ellerby), Scott’s new-ish girlfriend, and head off to a countryside cabin near Emma’s adolescent home. Nearby, there’s a giant, twisted, old tree with an ominous hollow, which is said to be the resting place of a great evil. Emma recounts stories of warning from her family members, but a night of debauched partying leaves them out near the tree. They get spooked, some weird things happen, and when they try to leave the next night, things go even further sideways.

A world premiere at last year’s Fantasia Film Festival, Hollow isn’t a gory or effects-driven movie; it’s horror only in the broadest sense, rooted to the psychological underpinnings of the characters and maybe a pervasive human fear of the dark. (At home, you’re cheating yourself if you watch with the lights on.) Matthew Holt’s script opts to focus more on the characters’ relationships more than the legend of the place, which supposedly wills young couples to suicide. For point of comparison, Hollow is really more The Blair Witch Project than Paranormal Activity. And that’s fine. One wishes the movie had actually rooted down into personal matters even a little more, actually, because the fissures of Emma’s relationship with James, who suffers a wandering eye, seem to get a very surface-type treatment, and even more could have been done to dig down into the marrow of Scott’s romantic despair over seeing his unrequited crush slip away.

Director Michael Axelgaard does a generally good job of framing the action in a way that doesn’t elicit much irritation about the camera’s necessary, passed-around omnipresence. And he certainly extracts believably relaxed performances from his cast; Ellerby and Stokoe are the best, but no one embarrasses themselves, even if Plumtree’s character gets painted into something of a corner. Josh MacDonald and Evan Kelly’s similarly low-budget The Corridor, though, handled unraveling mental states much better. Hollow is content to unfold as an exercise in style when its conceit actually begs for even more exploration of its characters.

Then there’s the problematic finale, too, which doesn’t really extend the scares or spookiness quite as much as one would like. The last reel, marked by lots of yelling and narrative water-treading, represents a fumbled opportunity. Part of this is owing to the found-footage conceit itself, and the camera’s separation from a certain character. But a more innovative and active treatment, or even an authoritative bookend, would have benefited this material, and made Hollow feel a bit less hollow.

Housed in a regular Blu-ray snap-case in turn stored in a nice, vertical-loading complementary cardboard slipcover, Hollow comes to Stateside home video in a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, with a 16×9 1080p HD transfer and DTS-HS 5.1 and 2.0 master audio tracks. The picture is fairly solid given the narrative framing, with no issues with artifacting or edge enhancement and consistent colors throughout, at least until a bit of dodginess with the blacks of the movie’s last 20-plus minutes. A brief behind-the-scenes featurette is the set’s sole supplemental feature, in which the cast talk about the difficulty of ditching their cell phones for the shoot. A more ambitious release could have explored the found footage phenomenon, either with Axelgaard or just a bit more broadly; still, the multiple formats and nice packaging make this worthy of a pick-up for diehard genre collectors. To purchase the movie via Half, click here; if Amazon is your thing, meanwhile, click here. C+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)