Edgar Allan Poe’s The Oval Portrait is endearing. Which may be an indictment, considering it is intended as a gothic horror of the Rebecca variety, but the vibes are lovely. The environment is cozy. The romance is charmingly frigid. It is a unique throwback, if not altogether successful. Despite its many misgivings, it manages to enchant.

Opening on a foggy night on a frozen lake, with the soft sounds of a boat in the distance, Adrian Langley’s adaptation of Poe’s shortest short story is immediately a film that relies on its atmospherics. Andrew Morgan Smith’s score is a heavy lifter here, too, suggesting the old Hollywood stylings of composers like Franz Waxman (Bride of Frankenstein, Sunset Boulevard). The film has both music and visuals that are both ostentatious and sufficiently creepy.

The Oval Portrait Is Overly Dependent On Its Spooky Vibe, But It Kind of Works

The Oval Portrait is a split in point of view between a cold, reclusive antique shop owner, Whitlock (Michael Swatton), a romantic, aspiring artist, Ava (Pragya Shail), and a lowly thief, Julian (Paul Thomas). In his vast collection, Whitlock holds a photorealistic portrait of a woman Julian has been hired to steal by Grayson (Simon Phillips), the son of the Bancroft criminal family. Julian has twice now sent in a heavy to steal said portrait, but both thieves have mysteriously disappeared soon after entering the antique shop’s basement.

Ava, meanwhile, finds herself caught in the middle. An uncommon Luddite, Ava refuses to carry a cellphone or have a computer, which has the unintended consequence of being fired from her job unawares. Langley, who also wrote, shot, and edited the film, is too eager to display his young protagonist as an old-fashioned romantic that he loses sight of some basic plausibility. The refusal to have a cell is one thing, but the lack of a computer is another, and it seems hard to believe a person like that would exist, let alone hold a job dependent on the very technology she despises.

Ava has also just been dumped by a (of course) cell-phone-addicted boyfriend (Colby Frost), and her sudden influx of free time has pushed her back towards painting and a run-in with Whitlock. Their introduction to each other is warm; in each other, they find a soul mate whose love of old ways finds an equal, and Ava spends more and more time with Whitlock in both direct and indirect ways.

Swatton is great as Whitlock, his calculated movement and measured speaking voice combining for a compelling onscreen presence.

When she isn’t talking to him directly, she is at the library researching the mysterious history of Whitlock’s family on microfiche. Meanwhile, Julian continues to struggle to find a way to get to the portrait and is torn between sacrificing his life to whatever unearthly spirit exists in Whitlock’s shop or to Grayson’s rage.

Swatton is great as Whitlock, his calculated movement and measured speaking voice combining for a compelling onscreen presence. But almost every other performance is terrible. Shail seems out of her depth acting at all, her delivery confusing and awkward. Thomas is neither as nebbish nor as blundering as the writing of his character seems to suggest. Phillips is not at all the threatening mobster he purports to be.

It is evident that Langley is just wearing too many hats for all the elements to come together cohesively. Of the four titles he’s given himself, he is the most adept as a cinematographer. The film is swathed in warm tones, and the repeated appearances of the ghost-like figure that haunts the film is legitimately scary. But the rest of his fingerprint is wanting. His script is repetitious, and his editing is far too slow; the first act takes an hour. In service of the spooky vibes, Langley has foregone some simple questions of logic.

Given that the source material is so short, any adaptation necessitates a healthy dose of creative invention, but the plotting is very silly. The combination of crime film and romantic gothic horror never really gels. It is successful in its invocation of old Hollywood (including a very fun opening credits sequence), and its horror beats are effective, but it doesn’t work in total. And yet, The Oval Portrait kind of works for what it is, in part because of the atmosphere it so well establishes. If you have to be stuck inside a creepy antique shop for 100 minutes, it might as well be this cozily spooky.