Review: Nefarious — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Nefarious

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Rating: R

Run Time: 1 hour 38 minutes

Stars: Sean Patrick Flanery, Jordan Belfi

Writers/Directors: Chuck Konzelman, Cary Solomon

As a psychological/supernatural thriller, Nefarious may not be great filmmaking, but it is confident filmmaking, and sometimes that can get you exactly where you want to go.

The movie’s premise holds all kinds of promise for a nifty nail-biter: Dr. James Martin (Jordan Belfi), a young, smug psychiatrist, is buzzed into the Oklahoma State Penitentiary to interview Edward (Sean Patrick Flanery), a mass murderer scheduled for execution that very night. James’s task is seemingly straightforward: To determine if Edward is sane enough to be fried in the electric chair.

The warden warns the shrink that Edward is a master manipulator: “He’ll have your head so twisted around you’ll think you’re the killer.”

And as if to prove the warden right, the moment James sits down across from Edward at a metal jailhouse table, Edward issues an ominous warning: “Before you leave here tonight, you will have killed three people.”

Oh, and by the way, Edward adds, he’s not really Edward. He’s a demon named Nefarious. Edward is just the current meat bag in which he resides.

And so, for most of the next hour, we find ourselves flies on the wall as the initially self-satisfied atheist doctor sees his certitude steadily chipped away by this supposed entity who instinctively knows his every weakness; every dark secret.

Is Edward an incredibly intuitive nutcase? Or is he actually possessed? We’ve been to enough movies to know the answer to that question, but writers/directors Cary Solomon and Chuck Konzelman still manage to play a mean game of peek-a-boo in what amounts to a two-character drama.

As longtime creators of faith-based films, most notably the God’s Not Dead series, Solomon and Konzelman don’t try to conceal the moral issues that have defined their careers. The characters’ arguments touch on hot-button matters like abortion and perceived cultural immorality, and the God-versus-Satan battle lines are boldly drawn. But intriguingly, aside from an ineffectual prison chaplain, not one character in the film identifies as Christian, or as having any faith at all.

In fact, just about the only guy here who seems to actually believe in God is the villain of the piece. As a result, Nefarious gets most of the film’s interesting moments, his lawyerly rhetoric echoing the calculating logic of C.S. Lewis’s bureaucratic demon in The Screwtape Letters.

Repeatedly — and somewhat convincingly — Nefarious makes the case that humankind, despite its best intentions, will always drift over to the dark side.

“Hate speech wasn’t even our idea,” he laughs. “You came up with that one yourselves!”

The heavy lifting here is accomplished by Flanery as Edward/Nefarious, deftly shifting personalities and imbuing each entity with appropriate doses of menace and helplessness, occasionally making the transition on a dime. When he’s Nefarious, Flanery spits out his lines with alarming, disorienting speed; as Edward he cringes and sobs, cowers and screams. It could easily all be too much, but instinctively, it seems, Flanery knows just when to throttle back.

As the mystified shrink, Belfi offers a steady, slow burn, his character realizing, perhaps too late, that he has wildly underestimated his subject’s true nature.

Nefarious zips through most of its brisk 1 hour 38 minutes, its efficient runtime rendered even more lively by snappy editing from Brian Jeremiah Smith (Get Out). But after racing toward the slam-bang climax of a convulsive death house scene, the proceedings come to a grinding halt thanks to an extended, ill-advised epilogue featuring, of all people, former Fox News host Glenn Beck.

That’s a near-fatal narrative error — redeemed, ironically, by one last devil in the details.