Alexandre Aja has as many horror hits (High Tension, Piranha 3D, Crawl) as misses (The Hills Have Eyes, Mirrors, Horns), and while Never Let Go, which hits theaters Sept. 20, doesn’t belong in the former category, it’s also far from a fiasco.

The French genre auteur knows how to build supernatural suspense, and he does so with his usual visual panache and solid pacing throughout his latest, about a family avoiding a malevolent menace in a remote forest. What’s missing, however, is a payoff worthy of his set-up, resulting in a diverting thriller that drags its way to an underwhelming finale.

In the middle of dense, tangled woodlands, Momma (Halle Berry) lives in an old wooden house with her twin sons Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV). The reason for their isolation is that Momma claims a wicked entity known as “the evil” lurks outside the walls of their home. Fortunately, their abode was blessed by her grandfather, as were the ropes that she uses to tether herself to her kids whenever they venture outside on hunting and foraging excursions. One touch from the evil is enough to result in possession, so the rule they all live by is to “never let go” of the rope lest they court infection and doom.

This sounds batty, and the early sight of Momma encountering a zombie-like ghoul in the dark, only to have it suddenly vanish, implies that perhaps this situation is a byproduct of her delusional mind. Never Let Go teases this possibility for virtually its entire runtime, and that........

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