The Messengers, the American film debut for twin brothers Danny and Oxide Pang, is a copy-cat horror film with too much emotion and internal conflict for its own good.

The film stars Kristin Stewart as Jess, a teenage girl who moves to North Dakota with her family after she makes an unforgivable mistake back home in Chicago. Kristin’s father starts up a sunflower farm to deal with the family’s financial problems, but the real trouble begins as her three-year-old brother Ben starts seeing paranormal figures roaming the house. Jess notices his behavior and becomes the target for almost-daily ghost attacks. When neither of her parents believe her, Jess decides to solve the mystery herself and save her family before it’s too late.

Despite the movie’s promise of originality, incorporating the idea that children are more sensitive to the supernatural, The Messengers copies scenes from The Birds, The Amityville Horror, and The Grudge early on. The parallels with other horror films prove to be too much to let The Messengers stand on its own.

Another problem that the cast can’t pull off the drama in the script.

Kristin Stewart in a conference call said she was surprised by the level of emotion required by the movie.

“It was really one of the most emotionally and physically strenuous movies I’ve ever been on and I wasn’t expecting that at all,” Stewart said. “I thought it was going to be sort of a break, sort of a one dimensional horror movie, but it turned out to really not be like that for me.”

All of the performances are dead, with the only exception being the Turner twins who play Ben.

Baffling also is the amount of emotional conflict the movie tries to cover. There are just too many problems for the family to work through, especially when the actors look continually bored on-screen. The father has been unemployed. The mother is a mix of concerned, indifferent and frustrated. Jess is trying to make up for what she did in Chicago. Ben is decidedly mute.

Some redemption comes from the Pang brothers’ art direction, which plays with shadow and light to provide a stark difference between the darkness of the house, the green-toned basement and the bright sunflower farm outside.

Too bad the acting doesn’t come close to matching the drama created by the scenery, and the sunflowers sometimes seem to mock Jess as she runs between her unsympathetic family in the field and the ghosts in the house.