Nicholas McCarthy's The Pact is a horror film developed from a short, and unfortunately it splits apart while being stretched out to feature length. There are some very neat little scary moments, but the whole thing fails to hang together and the plot is muddled. Caity Lotz plays Annie, a young woman and recovering drug addict with some biker-chick attitude who is struggling to come to terms with her mother's death, and with being back in the family home in which so many unhappy and traumatising things happened. Soon, she senses that the place is impregnated with a spirit of evil. The "Skype" scene at the very beginning delivers a short, sharp shock, and McCarthy takes the time-honoured scary-movie trope of seeing something creepy in a photograph and brings it bang up to date in the era of Google Street View. McCarthy has a talent to unsettle – still not entirely developed.