'Frailty'
God told me to

THIS EFFECTIVELY MANIPULATIVE thriller touches on some controversial areas (religious extremism and children committing violence) and achieves moments of genuine creepiness in its story of a small-town Texas father (Bill Paxton, making his feature directing debut) who believes he has received a life-changing vision from God. He is given a list of seemingly innocent victims, and he ropes his two young sons, 12 and 9 years old, into the task of killing these "demons." The movie begins with a contemporary frame story in which one of the sons (Matthew McConaughey, with a suitably haunted look) confesses to an FBI agent that his brother is an infamous serial killer. In explanation, he narrates an extended flashback to 1979, when the two brothers have conflicting responses to the religious mania of their otherwise kind father. The young actors carry the film, with Matthew O'Leary as Fenton, who is dazed by his father's gruesome task, and Jeremy Sumpter as his younger brother, Adam, who believes in the Christian righteousness of it all. The violence is mostly off-screen – director Paxton is going more for psychological terror, such as in a Poe-esque scene of Fenton being trapped in a pit he is forced to dig. The central problem for the filmmakers is how to be plausibly frightening without going over the top into absurd comedy, and they mostly succeed, by covering the story with a Southern Gothic moodiness. The plot gets weighed down a bit by the heavy-handed baroque imagery, and there are several predictable developments, but the story ends with a satisfying surprise twist. (Summers Henderson)