In “The Prodigy,” a ho-hum horror movie given a mild boost by its credible performances, a small boy named Miles (Jackson Robert Scott) begins to exhibit disturbingly supernormal intelligence. Further red flags include sleep-chatting in Hungarian, abusing his baby sitter and battering a classmate with a wrench. If this isn’t evidence enough of Miles’ bad-seed credentials, he also has one brown eye and one blue — weird eyes being a dead giveaway in the evil-spawn genre.

Miles might be a little devil, but it’s not the prince of darkness who’s messing with his head. Enter a lanky psychologist with a very particular set of skills (Colm Feore), none of which prepare him for those of his pint-size patient. Yet the movie’s occasional chills do little to obscure the thin plotting, problematic pacing and a central mystery that’s left aggravatingly vague. Jeff Buhler’s script reveals too much too soon in a moodily photographed prologue showing a crazed killer mowed down by police while his latest victim escapes with one hand fewer than when she was snatched.

Directed by Nicholas McCarthy and set in a weirdly depopulated Philadelphia (played by Toronto and its environs), “The Prodigy” features the usual buzzing flies and de rigueur jump scares (the best of which is in the trailer). Taylor Schilling is perfect as Miles’ distraught mother, who catches on so slowly that she seems a little dense. And because fathers are often sidelined in movies like this, Peter Mooney’s restraint in the role, when the camera does find him, is to be heartily commended.

Toying fruitlessly with themes of reincarnation and the transmigration of souls, “The Prodigy” gives the audience little to muse on except who will make it to the end credits. And with how many appendages.

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‘The Prodigy’

Rated R for mutilated bodies, loathsome language and a mangled doggy. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.