Frailty

Year of release : 2001

Run time : 1h40m

Genre : Southern Gothic / Psychological Thriller

Cast : Bill Paxton, Matthew McConaughey

The movie was directed by Bill Paxton who also played the leading role.

FBI agent Wesley Doyle comes to his Dallas office to meet a man who claims to be Fenton Meiks, stating that he knows his brother is the serial k1ller named “God’s Hand”.

He states he received a call from his brother who told him demons were taking over the world, and he couldn’t destroy them all, and that no matter what, he had to take him to the rose garden, after which he k1lled himself.

Doyle calls the sheriff’s department of the town Fenton is from, and the woman there tells him Fenton stole an ambulance with his brother’s body.

Fenton starts telling him how it all started, back in the summer of 1979. Their house in Thurman was right behind a rose garden. He was best friends with his younger brother, and his father seemed pretty nice, as he has been a widower ever since his wife died giving birth to Adam.

One night, his father wakes both of them up, and tells them he had a vision from God in which an angel told him about the truth of this world. The angel told him the end of the world is near and that there are demons among us. And he and other people like him are gonna be given a list of names, and they’ll have to k1ll those people as they are demons.

Fenton doesn’t believe any of this. At first he thinks it was a dream, but then his father comes with the items he said God showed him to use to destroy the demons and the first list.

Soon after, his father wakes them up in the middle of the night, showing them his first victim, a woman who seems to be a nurse. His father puts his hand on her before k1lling her and he sees what she’s done, but we can’t see it.

After, his father buys a van and takes them with him, to help him kidnap people.

His brother is very young and impressionable, so he believes everything his father tells him. He even makes his own list with the names of the kids he hates. Fenton is trying to convince him to run away together, but since he doesn’t want to, he stays too.

In the morning, because he didn’t like how Fenton reacted, and because his brother tells on him, his father tells him his angel visited him and told him something he didn’t want to believe, so he’s gonna prove the angel wrong, so he makes him dig a big hole for a whole week, after which he makes a basement, covering it with the shed.

He brings a new victim, and asks Fenton to k1ll them. Fenton runs to the police station, and bringing the sheriff with him, who doesn’t believe him, his father k1lls him.

After this his father locks Fenton for weeks in the basement without food or water, in the dark, as he says the angel told him to k1ll him, for he’s a demon too.

In the present, Fenton tells Doyle the bodies are buried in the rose garden, and decide to go there, in the middle of the night, while it’s raining. Fenton keeps on asking about Doyle’s mother, of whom the latter has a picture of, on his desk. Doyle finally tells him his mother was k1lled a few days after that picture was taken.

 

I personally enjoyed the movie. I liked how it was directed, and the colors. It seems to be a shine on the white items.

We only see things from the lead’s point of view, we never see what his father saw.

It was sad to see how these innocent kids, impressionable too, were trapped with a man with mental problems, trying to force his madness on them. He hunted his victims with them, and k1lled the people right in front of them with an axe. The youngest believed his father’s delusions, and grew up to be just like him.

I think that if those people were demons they would have had super powers and escaped him. Also, what’s revealed at the end about what the kid saw, didn’t seem like demon behavior, I would have expected so much more. And we don’t know if it was real and not all in his head.

I liked the twist at the end. SPOILERS If you pay attention to the details you’ll see Fenton / Adam doesn’t shake Doyle’s hand when the latter wants to shake his hand. END OF SPOILERS

The acting was good.

The soundtrack was good.

The visual effects were good.

The movie received positive reviews, but grossed only a little over 17 million dollars at the box office, against a budget of 11 million dollars.

Cinema Score audiences graded the movie a B-.

You can watch the full movie for free on the Ok.Ru platform, in English with Portuguese subtitles, or dubbed in Russian or Spanish.

Rating : Worth a watch !