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

The premise of this psychological thriller holds all kinds of promise for a nifty nail-biter.

Nefarious (Believe Entertainment)

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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.

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Comments

  1. It seems true enough that the film targets three moral issues that plague the world of today: euthanasia, abortion and capital punishment. Introducing demons into the film in a way that moves a person with Dissociative Identity disorder to show an unearthly struggle with conscience moves morality to another level. The film masterfully proves a point that conscience is not just the choice to give in to one’s fears, or to submit oneself to preferred life styles or guide one’s morality according to one’s future plans. Rather the movie seems to leave us with a choice: accept conscience as the inner depth of the soul where one is alone with a wise and merciful God; or allow the conscience to becomes the devil’s playground. God deserves the former option. (I lecture in psychology and theology in a university of Tanzania, East Africa. You may publish my email if you wish.)

  2. I thought Nefarious was Faustian and left us with questions. Clinically he would pass the bar of insanity based on multiple personalities and not feeling pain when he deliberately broke his own finger. He said ‘”it actually felt good.” Relieved his stress. That is a benchmark of multiple personality disorder. But was he therefore eligible for a stay of execution in the mind of the audience? Is Faust redeemable in this movie? Catholics don’t support abortion or the death penalty, and the audience has to follow the grisly details of electric chair death. Disturbing. It’s a Faustian play with a final point: you can’t kill evil. But you can shine a light on it.

  3. I am surprised you gave it three stars. Most of the reviews I have heard give it a solid 5, but you do you. I also heard through the grapevine an application to the Academy is on the way for Sean Patrick Flanery to be considered for a 2024 Oscar. I can’t make it to the theater myself to see it, but you can bet when it comes out on digital release, I will be the first in line. I hope it makes a bundle!!!

  4. WOW!!!!!! O…M….G
    .. GO SEE THIS!! Sean Patrick Flanery SLAYED this role. Epic. Phenomenal performance. I was blown away. A must see psychological thriller. O…M…G…
    Raw and brilliant

  5. Hi Brian — No, not a shot at Glenn at all. He’s a pioneering broadcaster. I just found it unexpected that he’d pop up in a movie like this.

  6. bill,

    i so enjoy your reviews and your help navigating today’s movie scene. thanks for consistently guiding me to movies that i can relate to and enjoy.

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