Co-writer Steven A. Katz (he of Shadow of the Vampire (2000)) described Wind Chill, the script he wrote with Joe Gangemi, as “the world’s smallest ghost story” and it’s as good a description as any of this modest for fairly enjoyable film. Instead of a haunted house, the writers offer us a haunted stretch of snowbound road and while it offers very little that’s new, director Gregory Jacobs wrings some atmosphere from the chilly setting, even if it’s never all that scary.

The story follows the misfortunes of two Pennsylvania university students who, throughout the film and like the handful of other characters that appear, remain unnamed. There’s no particular reason why the characters are anonymous and if one was being uncharitable, one might accuse the script of being lax in the characterisation department. That would be unfair though. Thanks to decent performances, the characters are quite nicely observed in the early stages and the lack of names doesn’t really seem to matter all that much.

One of the students (identified as “Girl” in the credits and played, very well, by Emily Blunt) wants to return home to Wilmington, Delaware for Christmas and uses the campus rideshare scheme to team up with “Guy” (Ashton Holmes), who is driving in that direction. Guy seems to know a lot about Girl and claims to share a class with her, though she has no idea who he is. Their relationship deteriorates after a stop at a gas station where Girl is briefly trapped in the toilet and she later confronts him about his real motives, Guy admitting that he doesn’t live in Delaware at all and only offered her a lift so they could get to know each other. But Guy’s creepy behaviour is soon the least of her problems after an ill-advised short cut leaves them stranded in a crashed car on a remote stretch of woodland road where a hideous figure staggers past them, a sinister Highway Patrol cop (Martin Donovan) turns up with a terrible secret and other ghostly apparitions start to manifest in the trees around them…

The setting is everything here. The story is standard issue ghostly goings-on but the eerie woodland setting and freezing temperatures give the film an appropriate chill that it would otherwise lack. The revelation of what’s really going on is fairly routine but the story’s pleasures lie in the telling and on that score, it works well enough. It moves at a steady (too steady for some) pace and while there’s nothing her that we haven’t seen many times before, the ingredients are given a healthy stir by Katz, Gangemi and Jacobs, enough for it to feel perfectly acceptable if not even remotely exceptional. Clint Mansell’s eerie ambient score and Dan Laustsen’s photography certainly help and the make-up effects, particularly on a ghost that we later learned drowned in a nearby river, are nicely done.

Blunt and Holmes carry many of the acting duties and do very well. Although their relationship is an odd one, initially a toxic one thanks to Guy’s very creepy behaviour, but they feel like real people, she a bit unlikable to start with, him so shady that one expects him to be the chief sources of danger to Girl. The shifts in their relationship are well handled and the performances are interesting enough to keep us on their side even after they start making the dubious decisions that go with the territory with this sort of thing. Holmes – almost 30 at the time – was perhaps a little long in the tooth for this sort of role but manages well enough, but it’s Blunt, still very early in her Hollywood career, who takes home the acting honours.

Perhaps the biggest change it rings to the established formula is the setting. Most – though by no means all – ghost stories work in a single location, but often largely indoors, in the creaky corridors of ancient houses. Here, much of the film is set either in the claustrophobic interior of the car or in the dark outdoors, the protagonists lost in the wide-open spaces of deepest rural America with little hope of any real help coming. They’re also at the mercy of the weather, that force we rely on, often welcome, but sometimes dread, unpredictable and certainly uncontrollable.

Wind Chill is not with out its problems and lapses in logic – the protagonists don’t seem all that concerned about discussing the strange phenomena happening around them, just reacting to them as if they were every day occurrences – but it’s probably rather better than you remember it. There’s a gloomy and icy atmosphere even before the car crash that strands Girl and Guy, with little touches like roadside crosses at the crash site boding ill for what’s to come. Jacobs, a former producer and assistant director who had made his directorial debut with Criminal in 2004, stages the horror scenes efficiently if not exactly memorably (the car is attacked by unseen forces, the encounters with the Highway Patrolman and always incongruously announced by the car radio suddenly playing Brenda Lee’s Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree and mysterious figures lurk in the backgrounds) but he’s on surer footing with his handling of the characters.

Wind Chill was shabbily treated by its distributors Sony Pictures Releasing who, for reasons that have never been made clear, decided to release a wintry film set a few days before Christmas (most of the action takes place on the 23rd and 24th of December) in a decidedly unseasonal April in the States and a no better August in the UK. It was co-produced by Section Eight Productions, the company set up by director Steven Soderbergh and actor/director George Clooney, so it had a bit of star firepower behind it. It’s not the greatest ghost story you’ll ever see, but it deserved better than to be off-loaded with little publicity at an inappropriate time of year.