In Fear (though cursed with a too-generic title–it’s very loosely adapted from the web series No Through Road, and should have stuck with that handle) is a concise, low-budget horror film that manages to generate a good deal of authentic dread.

The only obstacle is having enough patience to get to it, but horror fans are accustomed to squeezing blood out of much, much less obliging stones. Nothing here is bad, even at the start, it’s just a little languid and showy, content to use close-ups of the cast’s eyeballs as a stand-in for actual unease. We start with young couple Lucy (Alice Englert) and Tom (Iain De Caestecker), who are on their way to camp out at a music festival with some friends. Tom, in the time-honored and slightly scuzzy tradition of young men trying to get laid, has planned the outing as a bit of a front: well, you agreed to the group date, but how about instead of that, we peel off and stay at this hotel? I’ve already booked us a room. It’s their two-week anniversary! Lucy scoffs at that excuse, but she agrees to a night at the rural Kilairney House Hotel, an inn so scenic and remote that it comes with an escort over the endless procession of crisscrossing dirt roads. At least it does at first. The hotel-logo-embossed Jeep abandons them at a fence, but Tom decides to shrug and carry on. After all, there are signs at every fork in the road.

But the hours pass, darkness creeps in, and the petrol starts running low. Tom and Lucy are going in circles, their tempers are wearing thin, and the shortness of their acquaintance is becoming more obvious. Lucy–who begins to believe someone is toying with them–is getting scared, and Tom’s disbelieving calm feels less like comforting steadiness and more like a stubborn refusal to join in on her feelings. This is the most difficult stretch of the movie, mostly because it feels like Tom is trying to challenge Micah from Paranormal Activity for the role of all-time worst horror movie boyfriend (don’t worry, Micah still wears that particular crown). Eventually, though, the weirdness becomes too obvious–and too threatening–for Tom to deny it.

And then, in the film’s best development, they hit a man with their car and agree to let him join their haphazard attempt to escape the tangle of woodland roads. This is Max (Allen Leech, of Downton Abbey fame), and he claims that whoever is tormenting Lucy and Tom attacked him too, and he has the still-bleeding head wound to prove it. But you’ve seen horror films before. You know where this is going, especially as Max’s questions about how Tom could have provoked all this start to shade from urgent to needling, especially as the visceral pleasure he’s taking becomes steadily more apparent. Leech steals the film, superficially confirming it as a Hitcher-esque tale of psychological torment but somehow making it feel more like folk horror, like Max’s demonic glee is a natural outcropping of the confused and untrustworthy landscape, like this isn’t a psycho’s revenge but some more primal supernatural punishment for the violation of a taboo. (Come to think of it, The Hitcher feels like folk horror to me too, at least in spots.) Something has been unleashed here, and we wait to see if it can possibly be put back in the bottle–but we suspect we already know the answer.

In Fear is streaming on Amazon Prime.