THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.
by Jarrod Jones. Nefarious is a tough watch, just not in the way its writer/director team Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon (God’s Not Dead) had in mind. This low-budget prison thriller, centered almost entirely around an extended sit-down with a loquacious demon played by Sean Patrick Flanery and a hapless atheist psychiatrist played by Jordan Belfi, puts a question to non-believers: who among us is doing the real murder?
Nefarious, which at first blush looks like a low-rent Exorcist meets Primal Fear kind of deal, is just asking questions, you see. It puts them to Dr. James Martin (Belfi), who is tasked with ascertaining the sanity of convicted serial killer Edward Wayne Brady (Flanery) on the eve of his execution. Edward, we discover, claims to be possessed by a demon from Hell and wants to get his execution over with toot-sweet so he can finally possess some other poor soul, preferably one who isn’t currently locked up in the state pen. “I get lied to all the time,” Dr. Martin tells a prison warden. “Figuring out the truth behind the lie is what I get paid to do.”
Martin is the starched “rationalist” you’ll often find in these Believe Entertainment joints, where spiritualism is the top thematic concern and unbelievers are depicted as dopes who talk their way into a theological comeuppance against their moral betters. That last bit is where the film’s rhetorical goals become somewhat interesting: Nefarious is being sold as a battle of the minds between someone who believes humanity is progressing as it should and someone who believes we’re playing right into the devil’s hands. The latter, in this instance, is a demon. “Do you think your atheism will protect you?” Edward asks the doctor. The way these movies go, the doc does until he doesn’t. Um, spoilers.
Edward, as mentioned, is played by Flanery, who growls through an Okie accent and has a collection of cartoonish facial tics so numerous that pausing the film when he’s in mid-rant becomes its own chaotic form of entertainment. So Edward’s been possessed by a demon. What does this hellacious bad boy call himself? “Nefariamus,” Flanery says. That’s Lord High Prince Nefariamus, “Nefarious” to his buddies, one of many infernal possessors who dwell “below.” “Our master is very generous with the toys he gives his children to play with,” he tells the doc. Edward is referring to Satan, and the “toy” in this instance is Edward, who killed his many victims as an unwilling demon’s puppet. Try to keep up.
Nefarious’ gambit — that he can prove his demonic bona fides after Martin freely commits three murders before the day is out — takes the theological shortcuts you might expect from the studio that brought God’s Not Dead 2 into the world. Martin’s first “murder,” for instance, occurs before the film’s events; his “victim” was his mother, who was given euthanasia as a mercy following a terminal diagnosis. Later, when Martin’s fractured relationship with his girlfriend gets brought up, his second “murder” begins to take shape. When Martin suggests that the personal decisions between him and his family are legal and logical, Nefarious snorts at him. Sanctimonious bugger, isn’t he.
Whatever schlocky veneer of sub-Blumhouse horror Nefarious is selling in its trailers slips completely by the film’s middle point. Its one-room, two-chair staging, shot at every conceivable angle to the point of exhaustion, slows its 98-minute runtime to an agonizing crawl. The performances are lopsided, too, which doesn’t help; Belfi punctuates his consternation with frequent clicks of his pen and peeved head tilts while Flanery goes full ham, bellowing hell-baked sermons at the slightest provocation. (A goonier moment is when, for the purposes of story, Flanery has to lament the loss of a double bacon cheeseburger.)
The most effective instance of Flanery’s performance, and perhaps Nefarious as a thriller, is when Edward directs his melancholic gaze into the camera as a prison barber shaves his head in preparation for imminent execution. Nefarious finally lumbers to a semblance of life after that and somehow gets around to earning its otherwise perplexing R rating. By the time it gets there, however, its endless speeches and utter lack of nuance have all but bludgeoned the fun right out of it. I mean, nobody likes a lecture.
1.5 out of 10
Nefarious opens in North America on April 13.
Directed by Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon.
Written by Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon.
Starring Sean Patrick Flanery, Jordan Belfi, and Tom Ohmer.
Rated R for an admittedly pretty effective burst of violence toward the end.
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