M. Night Shyamalan’s daughter proves the apple doesn’t fall far from the angry trees in her directorial debut, a horror film about a parrot delivery girl. You may be wondering why she has that job. My guess would be nepotism.

Produced by M. Night Shyamalan and written/directed by his daughter Ishana, The Watched (The Watchers outside the UK and Ireland) is what happens when a director grows up forced to exclusively watch the films of M. Night Shyamalan. It makes you wonder if he has produced not a child but a clone, built to shoot the scripts that are too nonsensical even for him.

Based on a novel by A. M. Shine, The Watched follows Mina (Dakota Fanning), parrot delivery girl by day, pretend ballerina by night. There is no time to explain that (apparently), because she has a parrot to deliver to a zoo or something. The movie also cleverly implies her mum died 15 years ago today, when she tells the parrot: “My mum died 15 years ago today.” The parrot looks embarrassed.

Before you can say, “Wouldn’t that make her about 25?”, the 30-something Mina gets lost in the Irish woods, home to murderous CGI creatures and Olwen Fouéré, reprising her role of white-haired exposition lady from Tarot. She takes Mina to “The Coop”, a big cube-shaped building whose only slight vulnerability is that one of the walls is made entirely out of glass.

This is because the creatures like to watch the cast stand around doing nothing, which the movie agrees is not human entertainment without appreciating the irony of making humans pay to watch it. Soon we fall into the same pretentious schlock category as Bird Box and A Quiet Place, its generic monsters governed by lazy rules (do not turn your back on the glass, if you look at them you go instantly mad etc), which the characters repeatedly violate with zero consequence.

Ishana Night Shyamalan has inherited her father’s love of Hitchcock and basic plot twists, and sadly his storytelling abilities and ear for natural-sounding dialogue (“John’s my husband, he’s very handsome”). The movie is both painfully earnest and completely stupid, never explaining how the characters survive for months in a concrete box without food, or even bothering to explore the room they live in.

The explanation for how The Coop was built (conveniently found in computer video diaries) is about as convincing as a Prince Andrew excuse. It is one thing to defy logic, that probably didn’t feature highly in the Shyamalan film school curriculum. But when you spend ages explaining your own hack premises in tedious detail, ignoring them to get to the next bit of script becomes absurd. Especially when the next bit of script is: “This must be where the fairies were imprisoned.”

To the 25-year-old director’s credit, her debut is technically accomplished, thankfully avoiding her father’s fondness for ugly close-ups and insistence on making a cameo. But the only frightening moment in this sea of idiocy is the realisation that M. Night Shyamalan has just potentially doubled his output.