Orion Pictures’ latest swing at the horror genre, The Prodigy, misses its goal of being a horror movie to remember.

The movie revolves around a young boy who is the reincarnation of a serial killer, and whose main goal is to finish the murders he never got to commit.

Although Taylor Schilling and Jackson Robert Scott put on great performances as mother and son Sarah and Miles Blume, the movie relies too heavily on being unsettling rather than actually scaring the audience.

The movie also takes the audience on a painstaking hour of dramatic irony where the viewer  knows that Miles is a serial killer, but the Blume family does not know and then denies the notion when it is presented to them.

The film takes a risk by revealing all there is to know about the antagonist at the beginning. The very intense and revealing opening prepares the audience for an exciting movie, but the rest of the film fails to deliver.

Overall, The Prodigy is not a bad movie, but it lacks the excitement of Orion Pictures’ previous  movies, such as The Silence of the Lambs and The Terminator.