by Katie Smith BBC News Online entertainment staff

Teenage actor Jamie Bell is making his first foray back into the movie world after his Bafta award-winning role in Billy Elliot.

Two years ago, aged 13, Jamie Bell stunned the movie world with his performance as ballet-dancing northern boy Billy Elliot.

He came within an ant's eyelash of an Oscar, won a Bafta and garnered critical acclaim at an age when he was barely old enough to rent a video without his parents' permission.

A successful comeback after that is not so easy.

Bell's choice of film is interesting - Deathwatch, a supernatural thriller set in World War I in which he swaps his ballet pumps for a Lee Enfield rifle in the boy-to-man role of 16-year-old soldier Charlie Shakespeare.

The film has a fine ensemble cast, including Lawrence Fox

Shakespeare is the youngest member of Y-company whose surviving members get lost in no-man's land after a particularly bloody battle.

Their only shelter is a seemingly abandoned enemy trench, where they settle and wait to be rescued.

But rescue does not come and, over the next two nights, they are picked off one by one.

Believing their attacker to be a German sniper, the men determine to kill him before he kills them. But their attacker is anything but human.

The spin is both the film's strength and its greatest weakness.

Precarious

Things begin conventionally enough and, for a fair part of the film, we do believe in what is happening - the horror of battle, the strength of friendships forged in the mud.

But then, quite suddenly, we are asked to take that belief and suspend it from a fairly precarious height as the film shifts from one genre into another entirely.

The novelty of such a premise is an attractive one until you realise that the two just do not mix.

Essentially this is a horror house movie made in the classic tradition. It is about a small group of people trapped by unseen forces, slowly being picked off - like Alien, The Haunting (the original), or The Thing.

But it is not scary. Evil red mists and walls running with blood - this is Hammer House of Horror and we have seen it all before.

The film is an allegory about good and evil

It is Bell and his cast who rescue this film from sinking slowly into the mud.

First-time feature film director Michael J Bassett has done a fine casting job.

Bell may not have picked the greatest film to re-fire his movie career but there is nothing wrong with his performance.

He is like a scrawny little brother - a bit of a coward, but essentially just young, and frightened and pretty loveable.

Hugo Speer as flawed hero Sgt Tate gives a solid performance but it is the wild-eyed Andy Serkis (the voice of Gollum in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers), playing the earthly villain of the piece, Quinn, who really stands out.

A giant of a man, draped in animal skin, Serkis has the kind of predatory intensity that recalls Robert Newton as Bill Sykes in David Lean's 1948 version of Oliver Twist.

There are undoubtedly plenty of plus points to this movie. It is dark, different and a little bit deep.

It is certainly entertaining - in a Boy's Own kind of way.

But it will not help Jamie Bell add to his trophy collection just yet.

Deathwatch is showing in cinemas across the UK.