Frailty (15)

Daddy's boys doin' the devil's work

Week after week, the movies spin us jaw-droppingly outlandish stories that we're meant to accept without a murmur. In this week's The Bourne Identity, for example, we're asked to believe in Matt Damon finding the number of a Swiss bank account concealed in his hip; or in Insomnia, that Al Pacino, tossing and turning in Alaska's extended daylight, doesn't just stump up for a sleep mask. Fair enough, we'll swallow anything. It's only when a film's story is actually about someone narrating a story that our ears prick up and we find ourselves getting wary of what we're told or shown. In Frailty, Powers Boothe's FBI agent listens to Matthew McConaughey's gruesome, rambling saga of Bible-belt insanity: "Keep talkin'," he mutters, and we're on guard. We may not always be alert enough to recognise a tall tale when we see one, but the tale in Bill Paxton's ingenious Southern Gothic horror film fairly towers to heaven above.

The great thing about Frailty is that, even though you know you're being fed a ripe old campfire yarn, it only increases the scare factor: this is the first American horror film in ages that unequivocally, and without any cheap jokiness to let you off the hook, chills your marrow. There are moments when the tautness in the pit of your stomach gets unbearable and you don't know if you can stand to watch the next development – and yet all of this is without any visible bloodletting. There aren't many serial-killer sagas you can say that about.

The story begins on a dark stormy night (when else could it be?), as one Fenton Meiks (McConaughey) walks into his local FBI office and announces that his brother Adam is the killer who's been haunting Texas. Thereby hangs a tale: FBI Agent Doyle is hooked, and by golly so are we, and in his sombre, sleepy drawl (and Matthew McConaughey underplaying for once in a lifetime is itself reason to pay attention), Meiks begins.

Flashback to the two Meiks brothers as young boys in the care of their mechanic Dad, as nice a guy as ever fixed a carburettor; he's played by Bill Paxton, whose first feature as director this is. Dad is loving, peaceable and perfectly sane – until one night, when he wakes the boys up to announce that he's had an angelic visitation. The Rapture is a-coming, and henceforth he and the boys are on a divine mission, entrusted with slaying the world's demons. "The angel called us God's hands," Dad announces in beatific wonder. "So we're like superheroes?" gape the boys.

As far as I can remember, Paxton – stalwart of many a James Cameron picture – has rarely played anything but nice guys, even if they occasionally go dramatically to the bad, as in Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan. Here his mild-faced reasonableness and cheerful workmanlike demeanour come into their own, making Dad all the more terrifying as he ropes the boys into his divinely-inspired DIY. Before long, Dad starts collecting his weapons of righteous vengeance, including an axe revealed in a sheaf of heavenly light and enigmatically marked "Otis"; I have no idea why that's so spine-chilling, somehow it just is. He even witnesses a seraphic apparition underneath a car: some less-than-divine digital gimcrackery that briefly tarnishes the credibility of an otherwise very controlled film.

As I said, not a drop of blood in sight: none is necessary. All you need to see is this utterly gentle, dutiful father aiming his axe at a "demon" – some unsuspecting local man or woman – as his puzzled children look on, and that's horrifying enough. We're so used to seeing serial slaughter treated as ghoulish panto that it comes as a real shock to see the subject done with this strange, everyday solemnity – though hardly matter-of-factness, since Frailty's tone is always pitched on the edge of the raging Gothic abyss.

It's in the psychology of the family unit that the film becomes at once truly nasty and truly poignant. The young Fenton and Adam (played with galvanising bewildered seriousness by 13-year-old Matthew O'Leary and nine-year-old Jeremy Sumpter) are forced to accept that their beloved Daddy wants them to be killers like him. Unlike his younger, impressionable brother, Fenton is old enough and morally informed enough to know that home has become a madhouse, but alone and unlistened to, how can he not go along with Dad's grisly charade? Frailty shows that it's only too easy for the defenceless to collude in evil.

This is an exercise in genuine Gothic, as the high Gothic tradition has always been about horror beginning at home. It's no surprise that a primary echo in this script by first-timer Brent Hanley is that sublime Southern nightmare The Night of the Hunter: there's the same juxtaposition of childhood innocence and terror; the same equation of religiosity with predatory madness; the same florid, plaguey atmosphere. Hanley lays on the Southern flavour a treat, with some lines rich enough to suggest that William Faulkner contributed a polish from beyond the grave; recalling the hole his Dad made him dig, Fenton snarls, "After six days that hole was as dark and deep as my hatred for Dad's God."

Paxton's direction is simple and controlled, rigorous rather than simply workmanlike – this is certainly no actor's vanity project. It's only as the film nears its end and events take on a mere EC Comics ghoulishness that the style becomes fruitily overstated. Perhaps blame Paxton's early history as a set dresser for Roger Corman, but the rose garden where the bodies are buried is drenched in more swirling mists than have festooned a graveyard since Plan 9 From Outer Space.

One thing to admire about Paxton and Hanley, though: they're not afraid of a voice-over. Wild as events get, there's McConaughey's measured, baleful drawl always carrying us along, defying us to disbelieve. This is a tale told to a sceptical listener, its fiendish persuasiveness all the greater since we're hearing it through the ears of a sceptical gumshoe, played by the heavy-jawed, basso-growling Powers Boothe. (Now there's a man who really ought to have the "Rev" prefix – was any name ever so suited to a tabernacle-jockey?)

In the end, twist piles on twist and there comes a point where Frailty seems to have lost all its tautness and wound down to a mere tale-of-the-unexpected. The final shot, however, a perfectly ordinary Texas street scene, gives you cause to shudder, and you leave the film thinking this is not just a horror story of bible-bashing dementia. If you haven't got the point already, suddenly you wonder whether Frailty isn't the only truly political genre movie to come from America recently.

As a parable about how extremism is handed down through generations, it's alarmingly timely. "Destroying demons is a good thing, killing people is bad," Dad tells his boys – a ghastly double-bind that makes you ask who decides the difference between people and demons. What he's really saying is, "If you're not with us, you're with the enemy," and as George Bush, on his own self-appointed mission from God, prepares to go demon-hunting in Iraq, you can only wonder – what kind of religious instruction did that boy get from his Daddy?

j.romney@independent.co.uk