Angels and Demons: Frailty has an oddly ambiguous title that isn’t really explained by the text of the movie. The film pulls a neat trick. Ordinarily, one side of the religious fence is going to be able to sidestep the type of issues that Frailty raises. Frailty stacks the deck so that, regardless of which side of the theological divide one resides upon, the film has something to shock your sensibilities. For the true believer, there is the disquieting notion that God might tell you to do something so radically extreme as this. For the unbeliever, there is the secular horror of a religious nut whose activities scar the minds of his children. The film takes a side, but it might not be the side one expects, regardless of which viewpoint from which one approaches the film. At the end of the movie, the viewer is left with the question of whether or not good won out over evil or vice versa. It accomplishes this feat with some narrative gymnastics borrowed from, among other places, The Usual Suspects. The film gives the impression of being a puzzle movie, although, in the end, it asks more questions than it answers and provides a multitude of meanings. Is the film about the frailty of children? The frailty of faith? The frailty of unbelief? Maybe all of these and more, perhaps? The answer depends on what the individual viewer brings to the experience. The puzzle-movie aspect of Frailty is one of the few disappointing aspects to the movie, since it cheats to provide the ending. This failing is more than compensated for by the implicit reimagining of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre family presented by our central characters.

The Banality of Evil: The real strength of the film lies in its matter-of-fact tone and in the calm assurance of its performances. Paxton is excellent as a caring father who has gone around the bend. He’s not abusive in the traditional sense—he genuinely loves his children—so it comes as even more of a shock when he compells their participation in their crimes. He is an ordinary man with an ordinary job. The two kids, Matthew O’Leary as Fenton and Jeremy Sumpter as Adam, give nuanced performances, too. There is something about horror movies that brings out the best in child actors (for instance, Martin Stephens in The Innocents, Linda Blair in The Exorcist, Lucas Black in American Gothic (the television series), and Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense). O’Leary in particular is a match for Paxton, and the film is largely a contest of wills between their two characters. Matthew McConaughey delivers a convincing flat monotone as the film’s narrator, a tone that implies so many different things that one is never really sure what the role of his character really is. It’s his first really satisfying performance. As a director, Paxton has framed everything with the ordinary, a tactic that throws the extraordinary into stark relief when it shows up. Certainly, the one angelic visitation that the audience is privy to is all the more terrifying for where it occurs (Paxton is at work under a car, when the archangel, Michael, complete with flaming sword, descends from the depths of the engine). Paxton’s aversion to showing his character’s crimes on screen in grisly detail only ads to the level of unease generated by the blank-faced façade of the film.