Starring Edward Burns and Jennifer Ehle. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, October 21, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

Some leaps of the imagination are more difficult to pull off on-screen than they are on the printed page. When popular American novelist Alice Hoffman throws bits of magic realism into her mysteries, she's already devoted pages and pages to creating a setting where you might expect something supernatural to occur. The New England private boarding school at the centre of her River King has a storied past, from a flood that ravaged the building in 1858 to a headmaster's wife who hanged herself.

But in the movie The River King, all that atmospheric background is basically reduced to one idle remark. Abel (Edward Burns), a cop who's investigating the death of a student in the nearby stream, tells a teacher the old school gives the townies "the creeps". It's just one sign that touches of the otherworldly are awkward, even precious, here-taking away from the real human emotions at the centre of the story.

The body in the river is that of loner and outcast Guy Pierce (the believably tormented Thomas Gibson). All the cops and teachers seem bent on writing his death off as a suicide. But Abel uncovers tales of strange initiation rites and meets a mysterious girl named Carlin (Rachelle Lefevre) whose close friendship with Guy was making her bullying boyfriend jealous. The students' love triangle is echoed by another, more adult one: blue-collar Abel falls for a sophisticated photography teacher, Betsy (the smart and subtle Jennifer Ehle), who's engaged to one of her more tight-assed colleagues.

Betsy is the only one who doesn't write off Abel's suspicions of foul play to the fact that he's still haunted by his own brother's death, memories of which flash back to him in some abruptly handled hallucinations. Those visions, and some weird blurred images that Betsy finds on her freshly developed photographs, aren't enigmatic enough to build suspense or give viewers the willies the way they should. Brit director Nick Willing couldn't ask for a more picturesque setting than the snowy Nova Scotian landscape and 19th-century mansions he has here, but he doesn't infuse them with the necessary dreamlike atmosphere.

Credibility problems arise, too: corruption among the cops is laughably overt, while hazing rituals find the prep-school guys talking like 18th-century courtiers rather than wannabe frat boys. Still, the film has a strong cast that plumbs psychological and emotional truths you don't usually find in a murder mystery. They're so natural, it makes you wonder if they could have done without the supernatural.