Starring Jaime King and Terry Chen. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, February 1, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

They Wait, a ghost story with a surprisingly strong visual aesthetic, ends up undone by bad acting and trite writing. But the ride is worth taking for people who like their scares heavier on mood than corpuscular ooze.

The tale starts with an ill-fated bear hunt in the B.C. woods and a meticulous exhumation of human bones, about 50 years earlier. The rest takes place in present-day Vancouver, playing itself. The central family, however, is on temporary leave from Shanghai, where young dad Jason (Terry Chen) runs an import-export business. Back in Canada for his uncle’s funeral, Jason has brought his blond wife, Sarah (Jaime King), and precocious son, Sammy (Regan Oey), just in time for Hungry Ghost Month—a creepy celebration to which mother and child are particularly attuned.

It turns out that the family biz, now run by Jason’s seemingly mild-mannered auntie (Pei-pei Cheng), has plenty of ghosts hovering nearby. While the film, under Ernie Barbarash’s steady direction, is establishing the creepier elements of potential terror—with the aid of some well-executed special effects—the lad’s face is the best barometer of things to come. Unfortunately for us—because the young Oey is the film’s best actor—Sammy is soon pulled out of the story. Then, all too arbitrarily, his dad goes back to Shanghai, leaving viewers in King’s less-than-capable hands.

A rambling script doesn’t know what to do with her character, but that doesn’t mean she has to deliver lines like “I have a splitting headache” as if she just remembered that her taxi is waiting. She’s also saddled with a meaningless subplot involving a newspaperman played by, of all people, action man Michael Biehn.

The big finale, involving animal parts and a sweatshop, is satisfying, if a bit rushed. Are there some scary bits? Well, does a ghost bear shit in the woods?