Touted as a genre spin on family drama Kramer vs. Kramer, filmmaker William Brent Bell’s (The Boy, Stay Alive) latest imbues family dysfunction with horror fantasy. In this case, a bitter custody battle gets even more complicated when mom dies and returns as a ghost. Despite an imaginative setup, Separation can’t divorce itself from a lack of scares, tension, and underbaked storytelling that prevents emotional resonance.

Comic book artist Jeff (Rupert Friend) finds himself constantly at odds with his workaholic wife, Maggie (Mamie Gummer), over his lack of ambition or job since the popularity of his “Grisly Kin” line waned years ago. Their creative daughter Violet (The Haunting of Hill House’s Violet McGraw) grows tired of getting caught in the middle and often retreats into her fantasy world with the Grisly Kin. It’s exacerbated when Maggie files for divorce, ruthlessly obtains sole custody, then dies in a hit-and-run. Jeff must learn responsibility if he hopes to ward off advances by the babysitter (Madeline Brewer) and a lawsuit by Maggie’s father (Brian Cox). Then there’s the matter of dangerous ghosts, and puppets come to life within the family’s Brooklyn brownstone.

Written by Josh Braun and Nick Amadeus, Separation lays on the family drama thick from the outset. Neither parent engender themselves to the viewer. Jeff’s disconnected from reality and more interested in reveling in long-faded success with the fawning babysitter. Maggie goes full throttle on aggressive and combatant distaste. She’s painted as a shrew immediately, relying on a single home video montage to offer any attempt at nuance for the relationship that existed pre-animosity. That Gummer is the real-life daughter of Kramer vs. Kramer actress Meryl Streep is a bit too on-the-nose. Similarly, Cox is also reduced to a one-note foil for Jeff. Violet’s more of an afterthought plot device, there to regress when needed or play innocent damsel.

As for the scares, well, none exist. The Grisly Kin and central supernatural antagonist look cool. From Bell’s imagination made realized by Hungarian artist Zsombor Huszka, the puppets and personified entities that appear throughout are well designed but fail to impact. Much of that is due to the staging. The entities often simply stand in a corner without any music stings or build-up to inject necessary tension. Despite one entity’s unsettling physicality, the creatures never bother to attack or demonstrate any real menace. It doesn’t help that many of the actors fail to look alarmed by their appearance. Jeff’s facial expression upon his first encounter with the main ghost reads as confused boredom, not fear.

After Maggie’s death, the conflict dissipates dramatically, and the pacing struggles. The idea of transforming the custody battle from legal to supernatural seems solid, but the narrative doesn’t know what to do with that. The grandfather makes hollow threats every once in a while, when convenient. Instead of putting Jeff’s relationship with his daughter at the forefront, it instead follows his personal growth. His new job at a comic company propels the underbaked narrative forward and relies on a new age supervisor to relay the muddled and thinly-drawn worldbuilding exposition. All of it builds predictably.

Separation sleepwalks through its contentious divorce plot. All significant moments come across artificially staged, especially the intended scares. None of the actors can infuse any rooting interest in their characters, and the introduced themes lack poignancy or refinement. No fun exists in this family dysfunction tale, but the art department wins the film with the Grisly Kin.

Separation releases in theaters on April 30.