This Matthew McConaughey Movie Is One Of The Creepiest Psychological Thrillers Ever
His life was forever changed when his father announced that God had given him the job of destroying demons
In 2001, Bill Paxton starred in his own directorial debut, Frailty, a deeply unsettling psychological thriller about two brothers whose father has a vision that God asked him to destroy demons. The problem? The “demons” he believes he needs to “destroy” are ostensibly just random people.
The film starts out with the older of the brothers, Fenton Meiks (Texas native Matthew McConaughey), visiting an FBI agent in the present time to alert him that he believes his brother Adam (Levi Kreis) is the “God’s Hand” killer they are seeking. In a lengthy flashback to 1979, Fenton tells the story of how his life was forever changed one day when his father (Bill Paxton) announced that he had been visited by an angel who had given him and his sons the job of destroying demons. Soon after, he brings a woman to their home and kills her with an axe in front of his sons.
While Adam is young enough to accept his father’s story without question, Fenton is trapped in a living nightmare because the only adult in his life had become unreliable. For his lack of faith, Fenton’s father imprisons him in a hole beneath their shed. When he runs away and tells a local sheriff the story, the sheriff sides with his father and brings Fenton home. However, Fenton’s insistence that the sheriff look for clues ends with his father murdering the sheriff.
Warning, spoilers ahead: Fenton’s father reveals that an angel told him Fenton was a demon. During the family’s next attempt to destroy a demon, Fenton kills his father rather than the man his father insists is a demon. Adam then takes up the axe and kills their hostage. Back in the present, Fenton reveals to the FBI agent that he is actually Adam Meiks and the FBI agent appeared on his “list of demons.” A flashback reveals that the agent had previously murdered his own mother and that the other “demons” really were guilty of heinous crimes.
The flashback reveal was suggested by Bill Paxton’s friend James Cameron. Originally, the demons were going to be shown when Paxton’s character first touched them. Cameron told him, “You gotta remember film is so literal that you’re going to split the audience, and a lot of them are gonna believe that dad really is seeing all this stuff, and you don’t want that to happen because you want them to go with Fenton.”
In the end, the villain wins as Adam returns to his life as a small-town Texas sheriff, expecting a child with his wife, without suspicion and free to continue “destroying demons.”
