During the screening of The Number 23, something I haven’t seen in ten years or more happened. The film caught and the frame melted. Instinctively I checked my watch. Relief: It was only an hour and 17 minutes in, so this was just a coincidence. No elaborate marketing ploy was underway, and the sinister properties of 23 hadn’t reached out from the celluloid to send us grave omens.

Not that I was scared. I don’t think anyone at the screening was. The fixation of Walter Sparrow’s (Jim Carrey) paranoia plays more like a game for the audience than a genuinely chilling conspiracy of numbers. Hunting and pecking. Searching out the film’s corners for more easter eggs. Imagine, if you will, attempting to submerge yourself in a film’s atmosphere while constantly outside of it, looking for what amounts to a series of sight gags.

Doesn’t sound like it would work, does it? And for the most part, it doesn’t. It’s simple truth that Walter’s wife Agatha (Virginia Madsen) speaks early on; focusing on minutiae and setting no parameters means you can draw any conclusion you want and “prove” yourself right. Remember the Bible Code nonsense back in the 90’s? Do you really think the intent of the Five Books of Moses was to tell us when Princess Diana would die – but only after the fact?

As conspiracy theories go, it’s not a very compelling one, and it doesn’t help that the “evidence” presented is either uninteresting or nakedly false. 2 divided by 3 is not .666 but .6 repeating; if truncated, it’s rounded to .667. 9 + 11 + 2001 equals 23, provided you ignore those pesky zeroes. And we don’t know what day Shakespeare was born on.

If we were allowed to view Sparrow’s growing obsession with an outsider’s alarm, witnessing the death of a man’s rationality, that would be a certain kind of horror. And a pretty effective one at that. Witnessing Sparrow’s mental decay from the perspective of Agatha, or perhaps his son (Logan Lerman) would be riveting. Think of the breathless horror of Frailty and you’ll get the idea.

But director Joel Schumacher and writer Fernley Phillips want us to believe Sparrow may be on to something. But no amount of omens or revelations can convince us we’re seeing anything other than the contrivances of a screenwriter who’s jerking us around to fill time. That awareness of artifice – that persistent knowledge in the forefront of our brain that tells us we’re watching tricks – is lethal to the film’s paranoid atmosphere. With it, we are only idle speculators.

One of the more interesting jerks is the book itself, the apparent source of Sparrow’s madness. Called The Number 23, it’s about a detective named Fingerling who lives the Sleazy Detective lifestyle to the hilt. There’s just enough about Fingerling to remind Sparrow of himself. As he reads on, Sparrow becomes convinced the book is about him, in some strange and convoluted way. Agatha is no longer Agatha but Fabrizia, a scorching Italian temptress with unhealthy desires. Sparrow is no longer a dog-catcher but a detective, covered in tattoos and prone to play his saxophone when he needs time to think. And the number 23 haunts them both.

Sparrow’s fever-dream conceptions of the book’s action dominates the first half of the film. The number 23 consumes Fingerling’s life, and his destructive relationship with Fabrizia jumps the tracks into fatally dangerous territory. Blurry focus and a psycho-tense soundtrack do a lot of the heavy lifting in these sequences. The sequences feel like an intrusion from another movie, one dripping in illicit sex and grim murder completely foreign to Walter’s mundane world. But at least they’re interesting. I’d say they puts as much into The Number 23 as they take out, but only just.

I came in expecting one of two movies. One: A movie that was patently about what it was about, as evidenced in the trailer. Or two: a harrowing psychological thriller showing how just one doubt can pull a reasonable mind into unreasoning madness. What I got was a bit of both with a healthy dose of neither. The Number 23’s final revelations try to tie it all up with a neat little bow, but leave more questions asked than answered. You might think this ideal for a movie about paranoid fantasies. This time, it wasn’t.