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Nefarious ending explained: why the horror movie feels like a true story.

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The 10 Most Malevolent Demonic Possessions In Movies

The best demonic possession movie of 2023 revitalizes the subgenre (& it's not the exorcist: believer), best horror movies on netflix (january 2024).

• Nefarious blends evil, mental health, and supernatural themes, sparking viewer introspection on morality and reality.
• The demon Nefarious embodies a complex form of corruption, manipulating human vulnerabilities to challenge morality and free will.
• Despite what many viewers may think, Nefarious is not based on a true story, but the 2016 Steve Deace novel, The Nefarious Plot.

The following article contains discussions of attempted suicide.

The 2023 horror film Nefarious intricately weaves a narrative that delves deep into the psyche, leading audiences to wonder if Nefarious is based on a true story. Centering on a psychiatrist assigned to evaluate Edward Wayne Brady, a death row inmate claiming possession by a demon named Nefarious, the film explores themes of evil, mental health, and the supernatural within the confines of a stark penitentiary. This premise invites viewers to question the nature of reality and morality, blending psychological horror with supernatural elements to probe the darkest corners of human existence.

Despite its compelling narrative and thematic depth, Nefarious faced negative reviews from critics, garnering an unfavorable 33% on Rotten Tomatoes . However, this critical reception contrasts sharply with the film's overwhelming approval from audiences, who gave it a 96% audience score, underscoring a significant divergence between critical and viewer perceptions. This discrepancy highlights the film's ability to connect with viewers on a personal level, stirring deep-seated fears and existential questions, along with the feeling of the film being a true story.

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Amazon Prime has released some very worthy, original horror films. Not all meet the mark, but some have a Fresh Rotten Tomatoes rating.

What Happens At The End Of Nefarious

Nefarious is responsible for the three deaths in dr. martin's life.

Edward Wayne Brady is at the center of the Nefarious ending, his fate intertwined with that of Dr. James Martin. Brady's dark prophecy—that three deaths would occur before his departure from the state penitentiary—begins to materialize in a haunting and unexpected manner. The first of these tragic events is the death of Dr. Martin's mother, a deeply personal loss that had already occurred when Martin made the agonizing decision to take her off life support, a decision Brady eerily references, hinting at his unnerving knowledge of Martin's personal life.

The second foretold "death" occurs when Dr. Martin's girlfriend has an abortion on the basis that she thinks he will leave her because of the pregnancy. This is untrue, but when Dr. Martin calls his girlfriend to set the record straight, he learns that she has already gone through with the abortion.

Brady's influence extends beyond his death through the manuscript he authors under the demon Nefarious' influence. Titled The Dark Gospel , this work serves as a macabre diary of Dr. Martin's life, suggesting an otherworldly knowledge and manipulation of human affairs. Martin, initially skeptical of Brady's claims, is forced into a reevaluation of his beliefs following a near-fatal altercation with Brady, which precipitates the state's execution of the convicted murderer. This encounter leaves Martin grappling with the reality of evil, both human and supernatural.

In a final twist, as Nefarious attempts to claim Martin in a desperate moment, a failed suicide attempt—potentially thwarted by divine intervention—leaves Martin questioning the very nature of existence and the forces at play within it. Refusing to accept this as mere coincidence, Martin takes it upon himself to publish The Dark Gospel , rewriting it as a cautionary tale against the pervasive evil lurking in the world.

A year later, during a television appearance to promote the book, Nefarious returns to confront Martin one more time . Now inhabiting another host, Nefarious reiterates the eternal struggle between good and evil. This chilling encounter serves as a stark reminder of the film's central, if not heavy-handed, theme: the battle between light and darkness is unending, and the human soul is the battleground on which this eternal war is fought.

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What Is The Nefarious Demon?

Nefarious isn't just a demon but an insidious form of corruption.

The Nefarious demon, a central figure in the film, embodies far more than the traditional concept of a malevolent spirit seeking to possess and corrupt its human hosts. This entity is portrayed as an ancient and intelligent force of evil, with motivations and a history that suggest a complex understanding of human nature and the moral dilemmas that individuals face. Unlike many demonic characters depicted in horror cinema, Nefarious does not merely aim to invoke fear or chaos but engages in a more insidious form of corruption, targeting the souls and psyches of its victims.

Nefarious' influence over Edward Wayne Brady and, by extension, Dr. James Martin, is a testament to its manipulative prowess. Through Brady, the demon reveals an intimate knowledge of Martin's life, including his deepest fears and most painful memories. This suggests that Nefarious' power lies not only in its supernatural abilities but in its psychological acuity , enabling it to exploit the vulnerabilities of its targets effectively. The demon's goal is not just to possess bodies but to challenge and corrupt the very essence of what makes them human: their capacity for love, morality, and free will.

The creation of The Dark Gospel under Nefarious' influence is particularly telling of the demon's ambitions. This manuscript is not just a record of Martin's life but a tool designed to spread Nefarious' malevolent ideology , suggesting that the demon's intentions extend beyond individual torment to a broader desire to challenge societal norms and moral codes. The book serves as a physical manifestation of Nefarious' influence, a sinister testament to its long-term planning and strategic manipulation of human affairs.

Why Brady Was Given The Death Sentence

He is declared sane despite being possessed by nefarious.

Edward Wayne Brady's conviction and subsequent death sentence in Nefarious are pivotal to the film's exploration of justice, morality, and the supernatural. Brady, portrayed as both a victim and perpetrator, finds himself at the intersection of the legal system and the unseen world of demonic possession in the movie . His conviction for the murders of six individuals sets the stage for a complex narrative, where the lines between guilt and innocence, freedom and punishment, are blurred by the film's supernatural elements.

The murders for which Brady is sentenced to death are depicted not merely as acts of violence but as manifestations of a deeper, more insidious evil. This representation challenges the audience to reconsider the nature of accountability when actions may be influenced by forces beyond human understanding. Nevertheless, despite being possessed by Nefarious, Dr. Martin still declares him sane, meaning that Brady will get the death penalty .

From Pazuzu in The Exorcist to Valek in The Conjuring, here are 10 of the most twisted demonic possessions portrayed in horror movie history.

Why Nefarious Tried To Kill Martin

The demon is testing martin's faith & convictions.

The attempt on Dr. James Martin's life by the demon Nefarious represents a critical juncture, serving as a dramatic manifestation of the film's exploration of good versus evil, belief versus skepticism, and the power of human resilience in the face of supernatural threats. This confrontation between Martin and Nefarious is not merely a physical battle but a symbolic struggle that delves into the complexities of faith, personal conviction, and the inherent vulnerability of humans when confronted with malevolent forces that challenge the very foundations of their understanding of the world.

Nefarious' attempt to kill Martin can be interpreted as a strategic move aimed at undermining the last bastions of resistance against its dark influence . As a psychiatrist, Martin represents a scientific and rational approach to understanding the human mind — perspectives that are inherently at odds with the irrationality and chaos sown by demonic forces like Nefarious. By targeting Martin, Nefarious seeks to not only eliminate a direct threat but also dismantle the symbolic order that Martin stands for, further blurring the lines between logic and superstition, between the natural and the supernatural.

This act of aggression can also be seen as a test of Martin's faith and convictions . Throughout the film, Martin struggles with his own beliefs, oscillating between skepticism and the dawning realization that there may be truths beyond the reach of science and reason. Nefarious' attempt on his life forces Martin to confront these doubts head-on, pushing him to a point where he must choose between succumbing to despair or embracing a broader understanding of reality that includes the possibility of supernatural evil.

One demonic possession movie pushed the limits of horror in 2023 much like The Exorcist did in the 1970s, but it wasn't The Exorcist: Believer.

Why Nefarious Feels Like A True Story

The movie's themes are rooted in historical & contemporary fears.

Nefarious ' exploration of themes such as demonic possession and the influence of malevolent forces on human behavior resonates with historical and contemporary fears and fascinations. Throughout history, stories of possession and the battle between good and evil have found their place in the folklore and mythologies of various cultures. By drawing on these deep-rooted narratives, Nefarious taps into a collective unconscious, evoking a sense of familiarity and truth that transcends the boundaries of fiction. The film's portrayal of these themes through the lens of modern characters makes the story feel all the more real and immediate to its audience.

While Nefarious isn't based on a true story, it is based on Steve Deace's 2016 novel The Nefarious Plot . This connection to a pre-existing literary work imbues the film with a sense of depth and premeditation. According to Deace, the film acts as a prequel to his novel, integrating several lines from the book and retaining the demon Nefarious. Deace commented (via Christian Forums ):

"This movie serves as a prequel of sorts to my book A Nefarious Plot. Several lines from it are quoted in the film, and the Nefarious of my book is the one in the film, albeit with Sean Patrick Flannery’s personal touch. But the movie will show you the origin of my book. In 2020, I wrote a sequel to it called A Nefarious Carol, which we will also adapt into a film if this one is successful."

This deliberate weaving of the novel's themes and characters into the film's narrative fabric anchors it in a broader literary and thematic context, enhancing the story's resonance as reflecting true-to-life struggles, albeit through a supernatural lens. Additionally the comments by co-directors Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon about the film's marketing and thematic grounding further illuminate why Nefarious feels like a true story. By presenting the religious horror movie within the framework of mainstream genre, the creators strategically positioned Nefarious to engage viewers beyond the confines of typical genre expectations. Konzelman explained (via Denver Catholic ):

"It’s grounded in a theological sense, but it’s also entertainment. And don’t be afraid of the poster — [it] looks pretty intimidating. The poster is a Trojan horse designed to lure the mainstream horror audience into the film, nonbelievers."

Solomon added:

"Basically, they look at the poster and say, 'We want to go to that movie' because they’re drawn to the occult, which is exactly why we did the poster. In reality, anyone who has seen the movie can tell you there’s no sex or any bad language."

The deliberate choice to eschew explicit content such as sex and bad language speaks to the film's intent to focus on deeper, more universal themes rather than shock value. This decision reinforces the film's accessibility and its potential to resonate with a wide audience by centering on the narrative's moral and existential dilemmas rather than relying on genre conventions. The result is a film that not only captivates and entertains but also invites viewers to ponder significant questions about faith, evil, and the human condition — elements that are very much a part of the real world’s fabric.

The psychological depth of the characters and their moral dilemmas lend a sense of authenticity to the narrative. The characters in Nefarious , particularly Dr. James Martin and Edward Wayne Brady, are not mere archetypes but complex individuals facing profound ethical and existential challenges. Their struggles with faith, guilt, and redemption mirror the internal conflicts that many people experience, making their journeys relatable and their decisions and transformations believable. This psychological realism transforms the supernatural elements of the story into metaphors for the internal demons that everyone battles, thereby grounding the film's more fantastical aspects in genuine human experiences.

With all the streaming content out there, you're bound to find a great horror film to enjoy for the season and Netflix is the best place to look at.

The Real Meaning Of The Nefarious Ending

The movie's ending declares that the conflict between good & evil is never ending.

The Nefarious ending serves as a complex tapestry that interweaves themes of good versus evil, faith, and human resilience, offering a nuanced meditation on the nature of morality and the eternal struggle that defines the human condition. At its core, the film's conclusion transcends the conventional horror narrative, positioning itself as a philosophical inquiry into the essence of evil and the capacity for redemption in the face of darkness .

The final confrontation between Dr. James Martin and the demon Nefarious, especially through the latter's new human host, crystallizes the film's exploration of the cyclical nature of good and evil. This moment in Nefarious is not merely a climactic battle but a symbolic representation of the ongoing war between light and darkness, a theme that resonates deeply with the audience's understanding of their own internal and external battles. Nefarious' parting message to Martin — that the conflict between good and evil is never-ending — serves to highlight the perpetual nature of this struggle.

Watch On Amazon Prime Video

• Nefarious (2023)

'Nefarious' uses horror to tell a faith-based story. But Glenn Beck's cameo is really scary

“Nefarious” moves along like a garden-variety possession movie, with a convicted killer hours away from the electric chair trying to convince a court-ordered psychiatrist he is a demon who has taken over the prisoner.

Sean Patrick Flanery has a grand old time playing Edward, who has been convicted of several murders, and Nefarious, the demon who claims to possess him. Dr. James Martin (Jordan Belfi) is the doctor who has to decide if he’s mentally competent enough to be executed.

It’s pretty standard horror fare — Edward knows an alarming amount about James’ life, even though there is no reason he should. A light bulb mysteriously explodes. “Probably just a coincidence,” Edward says, shrugging.

Flanery really sells the possession aspect, portraying the demon half of the character as super-intelligent and manipulative. But is he faking it?

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Is 'Nefarious' a Christian movie?

Without revealing too much, he then rants about abortion being murder, which is all well and good from the demon's perspective, but not from the filmmakers'. And they're not subtle about it.

Up to this point, you wouldn’t have guessed “Nefarious” is a faith-based movie. Although it’s not a surprise, given the other films writers and directors Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon have made; their resume includes such films as “God’s Not Dead” and “Unplanned.”

Which is fine, until their message becomes increasingly heavy-handed and the film begins to suffer accordingly, at least in cinematic terms. (How it works on a religious level will be up to you and your faith.)

But including Glenn Beck in your movie? That’s neither well nor good.

Glenn Beck doesn't belong in any movie

Beck is a loudmouth conspiracy theorist who wore out his welcome at Fox News, kinda sorta said he was sorry when he opposed Donald Trump in 2016, and then changed his tune again.

He showed up on Tucker Carlson , for whom he might be considered a role model in the misinformation game, the night Trump was indicted, predicting that within two years the U.S. would be at war (with whom varied), that the dollar would collapse and that we’ll be living in a “virtual police state.”

This is not someone you want in your movie, no matter what you believe.

Beck shows up at the end, playing himself, in an epilogue. He oozes sincerity and compassion.

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There's nothing subtle about 'Nefarious'

Before that, the film is mostly a set piece staged between Edward and James. James is an atheist — oops — who doesn’t believe in demons or possession, or in God for that matter. Edward assures him that this will not protect him.

If you’re such a non-believer, Edward taunts, then let me inhabit you. (Note: He’s speaking as Nefarious at this point.) The confident James says sure, why not?

Dude, have you ever seen a horror movie?

A priest shows up to talk to Edward, who, while as Nefarious, screams and says he isn’t welcome — until the priest assures him that the Catholic Church long ago evolved to believe that most of what people think of as possessions are in fact forms of mental illness.

This renders the priest’s faith impotent, of course — it reminded me of the showdown between the priest and Barlow the vampire in “ Salem’s Lot ” — and Edward settles down, knowing he has nothing to fear from him.

It’s a bit much.

Again, subtlety is not the film’s strong point. Neither is casting.

Using horror to tell a faith-based story is interesting, if not successful

Flanery is the most interesting thing in the movie, as Edward/Nefarious torments the doctor. Belfi comes off as more bland, though so would anyone acting opposite Flanery.

Using the horror genre to tell a faith-based story is an interesting idea, even if it doesn’t really work in the end. And then Beck shows up, and that’s the scariest thing of all.

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'Nefarious' 2 stars

Great ★★★★★ Good ★★★★

Fair ★★★ Bad ★★ Bomb ★

Directors: Chuck Konzelman, Cary Solomon.

Cast: Sean Patrick Flanery, Jordan Belfi, James Healy Jr.

Rating: R for some disturbing violent content.

How to watch: In theaters April 14.

Reach Goodykoontz at  [email protected] . Facebook:  facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm . Twitter:  @goodyk . Subscribe to  the weekly movies newsletter .

Subscribe to azcentral.com today . What are you waiting for?

Nefarious Movie Ending Explained: What's the True Meaning of the Film?

The ending of Nefarious , a new horror movie released in 2023, leaves fans wondering what the true meaning of the film truly was.

The film centers on a psychiatrist assigned to analyze a convicted death row inmate believed to be faking demonic possession to avoid his sentence, all taking place in prison.

The independent scare-fest failed to impress critics, averaging a 33% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes . But although it only grossed $5.4 million at the global box office (per Box Office Mojo ), it earned an Audience Score of 96% from Rotten Tomatoes.

What Happened at the End of Nefarious?

The crux of Nefarious ' plot sees Sean Patrick Flannery's Edward Wayne Brady, who says he is possessed by a demon named Nefarious, tell Jordan Belfi's Dr. James Martin that he will kill three people before he leaves the state penitentiary in which he is imprisoned.

Those murders include Dr. Martin's mother (whom he previously took off life support), the unborn child that his girlfriend would abort at the clinic during Martin and Brady's visit, and then Brady himself when his sentence was carried out.

Brady also writes a manuscript under Nefarious' influence called The Dark Gospel , a Satanic piece of of work that reads as a diary tracking Martin's entire life.

Although Martin first declares Brady sane, Brady assaults James and almost kills him, allowing the state to carry out Brady's death sentence for the six murders of which he was convicted. Nefarious gives Martin one more chance to join him before the execution, but he then moves into Martin and almost makes the doctor kill himself before the gun he uses fails to fire.

Martin refuses to believe the gun mishap was an act of God, publishing Nefarious' book after rewriting it to warn people about the evil out in the world.

But after going on a talk show to promote the book a year later, Martin comes face-to-face with Nefarious after the demon possesses another person's body, telling him that the war between good and evil will never end.

What is the True Meaning of Nefarious' Ending?

Throughout the entire movie, Nefarious (through Brady) is seen ranting and yelling about topics many see as anti-conservative, including the idea of abortion and other serious concepts from Christian ideology.

For instance, when Martin prays to God as Nefarious tries to make him commit suicide, viewers have argued about the way the film may have presented that kind of religious belief as an overwhelming positive in the context of religion.

The talk show appearance from Martin seems to further push that way of thinking, as he infers more religious and conservative views are inherently good and the other side (shown by Nefarious) is bad.

The simplest way of looking at this is that the filmmakers looked to set clear qualifications and reasoning behind what is truly good and evil, using the lens of religion and theology as a guide.

While religion and horror movies are certainly no strangers to being used together, this film takes a much more theological approach to that concept rather than simply pitting demons against a God-like entity.

Many walked away feeling influenced by the idea that manifestations of evil are spread all across society, ones which can influence people to do evil things.

While everyone has their own set of beliefs (be them moral, religious, theological, or something else), Nefarious dove hard into the filmmakers' theories behind good and evil, putting them in the public eye as viewers analyzed the outcome.

Nefarious is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video .

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Common sense media reviewers.

Talky, faith-based thriller has a gruesome execution scene.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Viewers' perception of the movie's messages will l

It seems as if James is the hero, but he's very un

The four characters with the most screen time -- J

Gruesome, horrifying execution sequence shows a pe

Sporadic uses of "son-of-a...," "bastard," "damn,"

Cigarette smoking in more than one scene.

Parents need to know that Nefarious is a faith-based thriller about a psychiatrist who's interviewing a Death Row inmate who claims to be a demon. It includes a gruesome, shocking electrocution sequence: A man twitches in agony, foams at the mouth, etc. There's also graphic dialogue describing the process …

Positive Messages

Viewers' perception of the movie's messages will likely vary widely based on their beliefs. Movie seems to be arguing that atheism is naive and silly, while faith in a higher power is absolutely a given, but it puts this argument into the mouth of a demon and then pulls a bait-and-switch at the end. So even if we can guess what the movie is up to, the storytelling undermines it. Movie also has a clear pro-life/anti-abortion viewpoint and is in opposition to assisted suicide for chronic patients.

Positive Role Models

It seems as if James is the hero, but he's very unlikable for most of the movie -- and shown to be wrong about everything he believes in. During the "one year later" scene at the end, he seems to have changed and is open to accepting new possibilities, but he's hardly a clear role model.

Diverse Representations

The four characters with the most screen time -- James, the demon, the warden, and a priest -- are all White men. Women and people of color appear either briefly or in the background.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Gruesome, horrifying execution sequence shows a person twitching in agony, foaming at mouth, etc. Graphic dialogue describing the process (vomiting, urinating, defecating, eyeballs melting, etc.). A person dies by suicide, falling past a picture window and screaming. Character breaks own fingers. A character attacks another character, slamming his head on a table, wrapping a chain around his neck, nearly strangling him. Guards beat a man with clubs. Person grabs a gun, waves it at innocent bystanders, then puts gun to throat and pulls trigger. (The gun clicks and doesn't fire.) Jump scare (a light bulb suddenly explodes). Discussions of murder and killing. Mention of "sex slaves."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sporadic uses of "son-of-a...," "bastard," "damn," "hell," "sucked," "stupid," "ignorant," "poseur," "pathetic trash," "dirtbag."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Nefarious is a faith-based thriller about a psychiatrist who's interviewing a Death Row inmate who claims to be a demon. It includes a gruesome, shocking electrocution sequence: A man twitches in agony, foams at the mouth, etc. There's also graphic dialogue describing the process (vomiting, urinating, defecating, eyeballs melting, etc.), plus death by suicide, finger-breaking, an attack, head-slamming, attempted choking with a chain, beating with clubs, and more. A character threatens bystanders with a gun, then points it at his own chin. (It clicks but doesn't fire.) Expect violent dialogue, as well as words like "son-of-a...," "bastard," "damn," "hell," "sucked," "stupid," "poseur," "pathetic trash," and "dirtbag." People smoke cigarettes in more than one scene. The movie has clear pro-life (and anti-abortion), pro-faith messages. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (34)
• Kids say (3)

Based on 34 parent reviews

Nefarious outperforms.

What's the story.

In NEFARIOUS, Dr. James Martin (Jordan Belfi) is called on to perform a grim task. He's asked to evaluate incarcerated killer Edward Wayne Brady ( Sean Patrick Flanery ) to determine whether Brady is mentally fit for his impending execution. The warden (Tom Ohmer) warns the doctor that Brady is extremely clever and highly manipulative. And, indeed, it's not long before the accused says that he's actually a demon called "Nefarious." He tells James that, before the day is up, he will commit three murders -- and, additionally, he will publish a book that will change the world. Is Brady exhibiting signs of schizophrenia, or is he telling the truth?

Is It Any Good?

Well-acted and with decent production values, this faith-based thriller unfortunately gets stuck in its two-person back-and-forth sermoning, making it all too obvious what the outcome will be. At first, Nefarious looks like it will be heading into a tense stand-off, but before long it becomes clear that there's an agenda in place. James, an atheist, soon becomes powerless against the all-knowing demon, and every single thing he says is challenged and shot down, with no possible retort available. Then the inevitable happens, with no suspense. But what's confusing is that, if the movie is siding with the monster (as it does, all the way up to the cop-out coda), what is it really about? Even the fact-based elements -- like the process of an execution or the protocols of psychiatry -- seem to have been short-changed. Eventually, there's little to do but focus on the movie's smaller flaws, like Flanery's scenery chewing performance (he rapidly flicks his eyes and looks like he's trying to pick something out of his teeth with his tongue), or the baffling number of times he says "James" or "Jimmy," even though it's only the two of them in the room. In the end, Nefarious is a great title wasted on a letdown of a movie.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Nefarious ' violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

What is the movie's stance on capital punishment? What's the difference between the talk radio show's depiction (they call it "Game Day") and the actual electrocution?

How would you describe the movie's messages? Do you have to be a viewer of faith to appreciate them?

How is cigarette smoking depicted? Is it glamorized? Are there consequences? Why does that matter?

Movie Details

• In theaters : April 14, 2023
• On DVD or streaming : June 2, 2023
• Cast : Sean Patrick Flanery , Jordan Belfi , Tom Ohmer
• Directors : Cary Solomon , Chuck Konzelman
• Studio : Believe Entertainment
• Genre : Thriller
• Run time : 98 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : some disturbing violent content
• Last updated : August 13, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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• DVD & Streaming
• Christian , Crime , Drama , Horror , Mystery/Suspense , Thriller

Content Caution

In Theaters

• April 14, 2023
• Sean Patrick Flanery as Edward Wayne Brady/Nefarious; Jordan Belfi as Dr. James Martin; Tom Ohmer as Warden Tom Moss

Home Release Date

• May 2, 2023
• Chuck Konzelman, Cary Solomon

Distributor

• Soli Deo Gloria Releasing

Movie Review

After 11 years on death row and many delays, serial killer Edward Wayne Brady is scheduled to be executed by electrocution in an Oklahoma prison. But before that justice can be meted out, a professional psychiatrist must certify that the convicted killer is, in fact, sane—a step that’s proving difficult to complete.

“Every time this guy Brady’s number comes up, something happens,” the prison’s warden, Tom Moss, tells Dr. James Martin, the doctor who’s just arrived to certify Brady’s sanity. Indeed, James’ own mentor, Dr. Alan Fischer, was supposed to have done it. But after meeting with Brady, Fischer took his own life.

The incarcerated killer is, Warden Moss warns James, a “master manipulator.” Then he adds, “Brady knows what’s coming. He’s playing the system. And if you allow him to, he’ll play you too.”

James is unperturbed. He’s a professional, after all. “Look, I get lied to all the time. Figuring out the truth behind the lie is what I get paid to do.”

But Dr. James Martin has never encountered anyone like Edward Wayne Brady. In fact, it’s not clear that the person James is speaking to is Edward at all .

“Death doesn’t scare me, James,” the convict tells James.

“And why is that?”

“Because I can’t die. You see James, I’m a demon. … [Edward is] merely my host body, which I inhabit.”

James, whom we soon learn is a staunch atheist, doesn’t buy Edward’s demonic possession story. But Edward—who tells James that his real name is Nefarious—is just as unperturbed as James was a few minutes before.

And, Nefarious says, he has a secret. A secret about James: “Before you leave here today, you will have committed three murders.”

“I don’t think so,” James says coolly.

“Has nothing to do with your thoughts, your wants, your yeses or your nos. It simply is. It’s a fact. It’ll happen because I say so.” And in the handful of hours that follow, Dr. James Martin might just discover whether Nefarious is who he insists he is.

Positive Elements

There’s little here that can be characterized as positive in the way we normally talk about characters’ moral virtue or choices. James is, in a way, a sympathetic character, because he quickly begins to realize that whatever is going on with Edward/Nefarious, it’s unlike anything he’s ever encountered.

But James himself is not particularly noble or good. He’s good at his job, certainly. But as Nefarious points out, he’s self-serving and focused on his own needs and wants, unwilling to sacrifice anything for the sake of others. And, it seems, the demon’s clear-eyed understanding of James’ character is deadly accurate.

What we could characterize as positive, then, is this cautionary tale’s main message: The devil and his underlings are not to be underestimated in their ability to deceive and destroy—especially when it comes to their capacity to nudge humans into terrible self-deception. And with that decidedly spiritual moral in mind, let’s move on to the next section, because we’ll have a lot to unpack there.

Spiritual Elements

The vast majority of the film’s hour-and-a-half runtime revolves around two men sitting across a table from each other, talking.

That might not seem very dramatic. But it is. In fact, as the stakes rise throughout the course of this discussion, we can feel James becoming quietly frantic. He initially tries to debunk the notion of demonic possession and the possibility that this is what he’s facing with Edward and Nefarious—who are, I should say, two completely distinct entities here. (James tries to explain it away as dissociative identity disorder.) Nefarious occasionally gives Edward a chance to speak, and invariably, the demonized man desperately tries to convince James that he’s been under the demon’s control for years.

Most of the time, though, Nefarious is in control of the conversation. And there’s a lot of it as the two of them discuss the reality of God, demons, the devil, heaven, hell, judgment, damnation, free will and the ways that demons manipulate humanity to accomplish their primary purpose: smearing and marring, mutilating and destroying those created in God’s image.

Nefarious unpacks the long-term strategy that demons use to influence and possess someone: “Control of a host body comes in degrees, each with its name and characteristics: extreme temptation, obsession, infestation, finally possession, full subjugation. We own him.”

Nefarious later returns to the idea that he’s been watching and grooming James to use him for James’ entire life. “I chose you, James. And ever since then, I’ve been watching you, analyzing you, observing you, studying you for your weaknesses.”

“From inside a prison cell?” James asks (and a good question, at that).

“Demons can only be one place at a time. But we can be any place we choose. Usually I’m here with Edward. The remaining time, I’m with you.”

Every time James thinks he’s somehow logically or rhetorically outflanked Nefarious, the demon simply laughs at him.

James, for example, proudly suggests that mankind has evolved past religious dogma to a more enlightened, progressive understanding of reality. Freedom , he calls it. “We’ve never been freer. Literacy is at an all-time high. We’re working to eliminate racism, intolerance, gender inequality. People can love whom the want, be who they want, do what they want. Diversity is no longer a dream. Hate speech is no longer tolerated. And politically, we’re reclaiming the moral high ground.”

Nefarious laughs: “James, I think I love you.” He goes on to say that the world has more slaves than ever before in history: “Forty-eight million slaves—half of them sex slaves. Hate speech? The irony is we didn’t even come up with that one. You did it all by yourself. Sometimes you amaze even us. Now there’s evil everywhere, and no one even cares.”

“Yeah, I don’t agree,” James counters.

“Proving that we achieved our goal. Slowly. With your movies, your TV, and your media. We desensitized you. Redirected your worldview. To the point that you can’t recognize evil when it’s right in front of your face. More to the point, James, you can’t even feel it when you’re doing it. As for winners and losers, whoa, whoa, whoa! That gets decided at the time of death. The exact numbers are a closely guarded secret, but there are more of you ending up in my master’s house than with the Enemy. A lot more, Jimmy.”

There’s a great deal more of such conversation throughout this tense film as James is forced to confront the possibility that perhaps his cherished beliefs—or lack thereof—are simply wrong.

Sexual Content

Nefarious knows James has gotten his current girlfriend pregnant.

Violent Content

Nefarious breaks his own fingers grotesquely at various points. Near the film’s end, we see that that his hand is badly bruised from those self-inflicted injuries.

Nefarious brags that through Edward, he’s killed 11 people: “Six convicted, one suspected, four that they don’t have the capacity to figure out.”

James’ mentor, Dr. Alan Fischer, commits suicide by jumping off a building after his interaction with Nefarious. We see him fall past a window, screaming.

Nefarious graphically describes how electrocution will affect Edward’s body: “He’ll urinate, defecate and vomit, all at the same time. The sickly sweet smell of burning flesh will permeate the chamber.” He goes on with more such details, finally concluding, “I can’t think of a better introduction to damnation. It’s so horrible it’s wonderful, James. Only crucifixion is worse, but that really wasn’t on the menu, was it?”

I had hoped that verbal description would suffice. But when Edward is executed—which feels like a forgone conclusion—the camera does indeed show us most of the horrible things Nefarious predicted. It’s a graphic, gratuitous, lengthy, disturbing scene that leaves Edward a smoking and burnt corpse. It definitely earns this film’s R-rating.

In the course of their conversations, the subject of abortion comes up (which has a deeply personal connection to James’ own story). Nefarious connects the modern-day practice of abortion to infant sacrifice in biblical times in a way that infuriates James. “The Creator creates, and we destroy. And we do all of it through you. We always have. Did you forget your history, Jimmy? Even in ancient times, the arch-demon Molech was celebrated by tossing infants into flaming bonfires.”

“What does this have to do with me?” James asks.

“Oh, nothing, James. Especially since the priests now wear surgical scrubs, the killing takes place in the womb, so there’s no screaming to be heard anyway, and the remains are tossed into a gas-fired crematorium. No, James, no, no, no. There’s no parallel whatsoever to you. Can you imagine the agony the Carpenter feels when we rip a child to pieces inside its own mother’s womb? ‘Cause that’s what we do, James. You and us. We do it together. … And all hell rejoices.”

Two physical altercations nearly leave another person dead by the end of the film, one involving a chain and suffocation, the other a gun pointed at someone’s head.

[ Spoiler Warning ] In a way, by the end, James is at least partially responsible for the deaths of three people, though not in ways he—or we—really see coming.

Crude or Profane Language

One use each of “d–n,” “d–ned,” “h—,” an unfinished “son of a—” and “What the heck?”

Drug and Alcohol Content

The prison warden tells James that he always buys a pack of cigarettes the day before an execution, then tosses whatever he hasn’t smoked after that. Accordingly, we see both the warden and James each smoke a couple of cigarettes.

Other Negative Elements

Nefarious is not your average thriller. Or horror movie. Or Christian movie. In fact, it’s not like much I’ve ever seen.

Christian movies often rely on chatty exposition in a way that can, at times, make them feel more like sermons than stories. We Christians, especially Protestants, tend to trust our words and clear theological answer s more than we trust images and unanswered questions . So we use lots of both.

There are a lot of words in this movie. I’d love to know how many, actually. But somehow, all that talking didn’t feel like a sermon to me—even though the demon Nefarious does plenty of sermonizing. Instead, it felt like a remarkably unnerving illustration of how Satan and his demons deceive, divide and destroy—all reinforced by tour de force acting performances by Sean Patrick Flanery (Edward/Nefarious) and Jordan Belfi (Dr. James Martin).

At the risk raising an eyebrow or two, I think this intense thriller feels like a second cousin of sorts to C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters , that famous work in which a senior demon explains to a junior demon exactly how to deceive humanity. Like Lewis’ demonic dialogue there, Nefarious also prompts and provokes us to ponder how our spiritual enemy lights the long fuse his dastardly deeds.

There’s a lot to unpack in this film. For some, I think it could be a redemptive conversation starter about spiritual reality and spiritual warfare.

That said, two cautions.

One, this movie is R-rated for a reason, namely, that electrocution scene at the end. It’s graphic, grisly and disturbing. It rightly warrants the restrictive rating this film has been given. Those images should be approached with caution and consideration and the knowledge that the climatic execution scene is on its way.

Second, pop-cultural depictions of demonic influence and activity always need to be weighed carefully from a theological perspective. I think this movie gets the big-picture details right and powerfully reminds us of them: We have a spiritual enemy who “only comes to steal and kill and destroy” (John 10:10). This movie illustrates that truth powerfully. Still, I suspect that experts in the area of demonic influence might have some questions to ask about the details of how that phenomenon is fictionally represented here.

Nefarious is a provocative film, one that illustrates the cautionary counsel of 1 Peter 5:8: “Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.”

Whether or not you or your family members need to see this intriguing-but-disturbing film to be reminded of that truth is a question you’ll have to answer on your own.

Adam R. Holz

After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.

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‘Nefarious’ Is Unlike Any Other Christian Horror Movie

The 2023 horror film is streaming on Prime Video now.

The Big Picture

• Nefarious is a Christian thriller that rises above clichés, presenting itself as a psychological horror with low supernatural content.
• Sean Patrick Flanery's performance as the maniacal demon Nefarious is captivating and makes the film thrilling.
• Nefarious modernizes the concept of demonic temptation, drawing parallels with C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters and exposing corrupt motives.

In April 2023, the independent horror flick Nefarious earned just over a million dollars and placed tenth at the box office on its opening weekend. The movie hit theaters around the same time as other horror movies like The Pope's Exorcist , Evil Dead Rise , Scream IV , and Renfield ; and with such stiff competition, it's impressive that this low-budget indie movie did so well. The picture, which is currently in Prime Video's Top 10 most popular movies , is based on a two-book series by Steve Deace and was written and directed by Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon (the duo behind God's Not Dead and Unplanned ). But despite the film's distinctly Christian label, Nefarious rises above the general clichés associated with faith-based productions and stands out as something increasingly more interesting than its religious contemporaries.

‘Nefarious’ Turns Demonic Horror Into a Psychological Mind-Game

On the surface, Nefarious presents itself as a psychological horror film; and while that is certainly accurate, it's only part of the truth. At times, the film echoes a poor man's Silence of the Lambs ; but mostly, Nefarious is a Christian thriller with low supernatural content and a whole lot of drama . At parts, the drama is believable and works well, and other times it feels a bit contrived. Still, in either case, it keeps the audience engaged until the end. The film centers on a convicted serial killer named Edward Wayne Brady ( Sean Patrick Flanery ), a man on death row who claims that he is possessed by a demon who calls himself Nefarious. To determine whether Edward is sane enough to be executed by the State of Oklahoma (which still offers the death penalty), Dr. James Martin ( Jordan Belfi ) is sent in to evaluate the situation. Naturally, things don't go according to the good doctor's plan.

In highlighting the psychological aspect of the film rather than the supernatural, Nefarious plays more like an extended criminal drama that makes us question what's real. While there comes a point where we all rightfully guess that Nefarious is a true demonic force rather than one of Edward's alternate personalities (à la Split ), there's a good amount of time there where we wonder if he's just insane. Part of Nefarious ' strength is that it keeps us guessing from the start, though it fails to maintain that suspense throughout. However, what could be seen as a failure might be a strength, since it's the demonic element of this case study that makes Nefarious unique .

"[ Nefarious ] is the best movie portraying demonic possession ever produced," wrote Father Carlos Martins , a Catholic priest and host of The Exorcist Files podcast, which recounts his personal experience with demonic activity (via The National Catholic Register ). "Astute, careful and intelligent thinking went into its script." While it's true that the script here is loads better than anything from the God's Not Dead batch of "sermovies," it's the performances in Nefarious that really sell it — especially that of the film's leading star.

Sean Patrick Flanery Steals the Show as Edward Wayne Brady in 'Nefarious'

In only seconds, Sean Patrick Flanery can switch between the maniacal demon Nefarious and the frightened out-of-his-mind Edward, who struggles to maintain any semblance of control over his mind and body. Flanery commands your full attention as Nefarious masterfully unravels his intricate and devious plan to break James Martin into unrestorable pieces . The demon attempts this through a series of tests and proofs, but particularly through the aforementioned mind games that force James to realize that three lives have been lost because of his selfish actions. While James denies it, in a way, the demon turns out to be right. Flanery plays his part well here and is ultimately what makes Nefarious so thrilling.

Flanery is frightening as Nefarious, exuding the same sort of bent charisma that Elias Koteas does as Azazel in the 1998 thriller Fallen , another demon-possession picture that challenges everything we think we know about the horror sub-genre . Like Fallen , Nefarious gets into the head of our demonic antagonist while allowing us to think that our hero has the upper hand by the end , only for those notions to come crashing down. That's not exactly the sort of message you'd expect to find in a Christian-made horror movie about demons, but it's an interesting one that leaves audiences unsettled and possibly even confused. Of course, Flanery's long-winded soliloquies on theology and morality aren't going to be everyone's cup of tea. Like any movie, Nefarious was made with a specific audience in mind — Christians (albeit with the hope of additional general appeal).

You Have 'Se7en' to Thank for The Rise of Faith-Based Horror

Despite the overwhelmingly positive audience ratings, critics didn't care much for Nefarious. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus noted that "it's hard to look past the story's heavy-handed proselytizing." Whether that's an accurate description of the film itself or a general disdain for the film's hard conservative stance is certainly up for debate. However, just about everyone can agree that there's power here in Sean Patrick Flanery's performance that propels Nefarious above most faith-based productions . And considering that many recent faith-driven stories like Jesus Revolution , The Shift , and The Chosen have been getting better in both production and entertainment value, that's nothing short of a compliment.

The Priest Doesn't Save the Day This Time Around

Perhaps the most interesting part of Nefarious happens near the beginning of the film. Only 20 minutes in, a priest, one Father Lou ( Daniel Martin Berkey ), arrives to help James discern whether Edward is actually insane or demon-possessed. While this instantly invokes images of Father Merrin ( Max von Sydow ) or Father Karras ( Jason Miller ) from The Exorcist , the results couldn't be more different. Considering that Nefarious opened alongside Russell Crowe 's The Pope's Exorcist , it would be a bit repetitive to have two demon-expelling priests in theaters on the same weekend. But Nefarious takes a different approach to the believer versus demon narrative , and it makes the film stronger as a result.

Father Lou doesn't believe in demons. After all, while nearly 70% of Americans believe that literal angels and demons are active in our world (via Pew Research ), that still leaves another 30% (a calculation that has varied over the years, even among Christians ) of folks who don't. Nefarious explores the idea that even a minister might not believe in such beings as anything more than literary references to deep-seated personal struggles, and rids us of any hope that we'll see the creature be cast out of the suffering death row inmate. That's right. There's no projectile vomiting here, telekinetic thrusts, or black smoke evaporating from one's mouth. Nefarious paints a realistic picture of how one might respond to a literal and unkillable demon , and it leaves us there.

Part of the film's strength is its unwillingness to rely on the standard demonic fanfare that generally embodies these sorts of horror movies. While Nefarious might be more of a psychological/supernatural thriller than a straight-up horror, it still manages to make its titular demon scary without the threat of immediate possession or exorcism . To go a step further, the film correctly notes the gradual series of steps one must go through to be possessed in the first place, moving from obsession to oppression to possession, the same way Ed Warren ( Patrick Wilson ) explains it in The Conjuring . After all, as C.S. Lewis once penned, "The safest road to Hell is the gradual one."

'Nefarious' Modernizes C.S. Lewis' 'Screwtape Letters' for the 21st Century

"Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar," wrote famed Chronicles of Narnia author C.S. Lewis at the beginning of his 1942 work The Screwtape Letters , which itself mirrors the "Dark Gospel" in Nefarious that the titular demon aims to see published. Lewis's book consists of a series of letters that a demon named Screwtape writes to his young nephew, Wormwood, in hopes of teaching him how to best tempt mankind and pull them away from God, often called "the Enemy." Nefarious uses much of the same terminology, and in many ways mixes well with Lewis' ideas of exposing a demon's nefarious plot for the sake of those watching (or, in Screwtape's case, reading). In that regard, Nefarious accomplishes its goal, and while it's not as well-written as Lewis' timeless expression of demonic will, it does the job just fine for 21st-century audiences.

While not a direct adaptation of The Screwtape Letters by any means or even the first to do a "modern reimaging" of the same idea (the Millennium episode "Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me" perhaps did so more creatively in the '90s), the film itself boasts many of the same components that make Lewis' work great, albeit with differing results . Nefarious's exposure of James' corrupt motives regarding his mother plays parallel with Screwtape's plot to keep his unnamed "patient" from having a positive relationship with his own, focusing instead on what's wrong with others rather than himself. And we can't forget that in his anger and frustration with the demon, James does send a man wrongfully to his death, justifying himself while doing so.

'Nefarious' Isn't Perfect, But It's a Great Step for Faith-Based Films

Nefarious is not a perfect horror film, nor is it a perfect film in general. There are some weird things about this picture, most notably the uber-strange and abrasive appearance of Glenn Beck at the end, but strange doesn't mean bad. There's no denying that Nefarious is a film genuinely confident in its premise and execution . It's that confidence, in the direction and performances especially, that makes the film work despite its flaws — and that's a lot more than what most Christian thrillers can say.

You might expect a movie like Nefarious to end with a hamfisted conversion scene that brings James to his knees in a "come to Jesus" moment, but the filmmakers avoid that entirely. In fact, this picture ends the same way many other horror films do — with the titular evil returning to haunt our hero just before the credits roll . It's a powerful ending, one that carries a lot of weight when you consider that the demon had tried to kill James just a year prior. Steve Deace, who wrote the original Nefarious novels, has since announced that a sequel film is in development , as is a subsequent television series with stars Sean Patrick Flanery and Jordan Belfi set to return. How that all will work is yet a mystery, but one thing is clear: the Nefarious story will far outlive the electric chair.

Nefarious can be streamed on Prime Video.

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Nefarious (2023)

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April 13, 2023

Movies , Movies for the Rest of Us

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.

Bill Newcott

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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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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.)

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.

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!!!

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

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.

Devra, thanks for your kind words! I know, there are a lot of movies out there, aren’t there??

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.

Is that a shot at Glenn Beck?

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‘Nefarious’: Filmmakers Take the Mask Off Evil in New Exorcism Film

‘Rather than getting bogged down — like every other movie — in diabolical phenomena and power, this one brings the viewer into the demonic mind …’

Opening on 1,200 screens this past weekend, the film Nefarious is a horror thriller like none other, spotlighting the epic battle between evil and human souls.

Co-writers-directors Cary Solomon and Chuck Konzelman ’s supernatural thriller was inspired by the book A Nefarious Plot by New York Times best-selling author Steve Deace. A criminal awaiting execution gets a last-minute reprieve when a court order sends a psychiatrist to examine if he is trying to avoid the death penalty with his behavior. The doctor finds he is a demon who wants to be executed, leading to an edge-of-the-seat battle of good against evil. Both writers, known for Unplanned , consider this their best work up to date and spoke at length with Register staff writer Joseph Pronechen about their film. In addition, the Register asked exorcist Father Carlos Martins his impressions of the film.

What prompted you to make this film?

Konzelman: In this film, the audience finds out what the demons have known all along — that we’re not really in a cultural battle; we’re in a spiritual battle. And the battle takes place one soul at a time.

Solomon: The film lets everyone know there’s good and evil. This demon is telling the story, the truth, on not only creation and God, but, from their point of view, how they’re going to destroy the world and how they’re doing it. And the thing is, it’s all based on fact.

Konzelman: It’s grounded in a theological sense, but it’s also entertainment. And don’t be afraid of the poster — [it] looks pretty intimidating. The poster is a Trojan horse designed to lure the mainstream horror audience into the film, nonbelievers.

Solomon: Basically, they look at the poster and say, “We want to go to that movie” because they’re drawn to the occult, which is exactly why we did the poster. In reality, anyone who has seen the movie can tell you there’s no sex or any bad language.

It’s a supernatural thriller. What we need to realize is that [people] today are doing Ouija boards, tarot cards, Reiki, yoga, getting pagan tattoos. All these are ways that people are getting infested. If you play with the devil, he will come. … All the world [is] surrounded by the occult , especially on TV and in the movie theaters. So it’s a perfect time for this to show the wickedness and the evil of the devil.

This movie is saying, “Don’t play with the devil. If you dance with the devil, you’re going to lose.” We point that out, but we do it in a very smart, cinematic way — we tell a story. Jesus told parables for a reason because stories are the most powerful way to convey information to people.

Have you experienced unusual problems making the movie?

Solomon: Literally, it has been a fight for us. The whole crew caught COVID. We had to start the movie all over. We had eight car accidents in a matter of 11 or 12 days. No one was hurt, but all the cars were totaled. So you see the devil tries to kill people and the Lord protects them. At our office building in Burbank, California, the whole roof was ripped off during a rainstorm. That doesn’t happen in rainstorms.

Konzelman: Our on-set priest, who was trained in exorcisms, during shooting had an emergency appendectomy. The surgeon told him how the appendix actually burst during removal and told him if he showed up an hour later, “You probably wouldn’t be here.”

You really expose Satan and his tactics in the movie.

We drag him from the darkness and bring him into the light. Because we show that he’s real. He’s got a plan. He’s initiating that plan. If we go back to the Bible, what does it say? There will come a time when good is considered bad, and bad is considered good, when women will be as men, when all these things that are happening in our world today, that the saints have prophesied about, that the Bible has spoken about. You can see the devil’s machinations all across the world. What we’ve done and why he’s angry and why he’s attacking everyone is that we brought him into the light. We’ve revealed him. People seeing this movie are saying, “I have to reconsider my life.”

Konzelman: The devil hopes you don’t see the movie.

Solomon: Catholics have to go see the movie because we need to get a refresher course on the devil. We need to realize that the devil is real. If you really truly believe in the devil, you will change your life because you will suddenly realize: “Somebody is after my soul. If I lose this battle, where do I go?” And the problem with most people is they’re distracted. And that’s the way the devil wants it.

There’s no doubt this film speaks from the Catholic perspective, a Catholic film.

Konzelman: Deeply Catholic. Here’s the surprise for us, though. We have shown this to a number of pastors and a number of theologians all across the Christian spectrum. And they agree with everything that’s in there. That came almost as a shock to us. They’re all dealing with the same problem. They all recognize this as the face of the adversary that they’re up against. And no one’s voiced any questions or problems with the theology.

Solomon: I think the Lord anointed the movie. The Bible says, when you judge a man, look at the fruit of his tree. I would ask people — by the way, Chuck and I are devout Catholics; we love the Lord; we love the Blessed Virgin; we love our saints. We have a priest on set with us every movie. If you look at the fruit of our tree, you’ll see [our films] God’s Not Dead , Unplanned . We’ve taken a position consistently to do the Lord’s work.

What signs of hope do you also see the movie bringing about?

Solomon: I think that the Lord is calling out that he is separating the wheat and the chaff. He’s still crying out to the chaff. He still wants to save them. 

Konzelman: This is the movie for your family member who has fallen away from the faith, or your friend who has never been a believer. You can take them to this film, and under the guise of entertainment, they’re going to be confronted with the greater questions. Be prepared to have a conversation afterwards, because they’re going to be asking the important questions.

The devil is the accuser. Ironically, in this film, he’s accusing us, quite rightly, as a society, of hiding the truth from ourselves. The devil has been so emboldened that now he’s dropping the mask. And for reasons that make sense within the story, the demon tells the truth from his point of view. And his point of view is that he absolutely believes in God. He absolutely believes every word of Scripture; he just hates it. He wishes it wasn’t true.

Why do you think the film will reach the hearts of viewers with this approach?

Solomon: Now, sadly, if a pastor or a priest was preaching to the audience in a movie, the audience would not listen to them. These are the sad times we live in. We use that demon to preach the Gospel even though he hates it, but it validates God in his doing so.

Konzelman: It’s like C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters ; he’s preaching the Gospel from the other side of the mirror.

How is it different from other exorcism movies?

When you see a Hollywood horror movie, it’s designed to tear down God. It’s blasphemous. It’s heretical. It’s evil. It basically tears down the Church on every level. We do the opposite: We’re glorifying God, glorifying everything that is good and right and righteous in this movie, but we’re doing it in a very smart way. It’s a totally different kind of movie. No one is walking up the side of the walls … and doing foul, wretched things.

Solomon: Everything about this movie is Catholic. It’s an exorcism film, No. 1.

We use [Anne] Catherine Emmerich’s visions. We talk about creation; we talk about good and evil. We talk about how the devil was thrown out.

Konzelman: A lot of our audiences of post-Christian age in the United States had never heard this before.

Solomon: We talk about the views and values of the Church: no euthanasia; no abortion; no murder. It’s a totally Catholic story. And as we’re very excited about it, because we’ve wanted to make Catholic movies for a long, long time. Our goal is to bring out as many Catholic movies as possible.

Solomon: We’re very excited to see what the Lord does with it, especially since he’s the one who told us to do it. We feel that he wrote it; he shot it. Look, we’re just two guys from New Jersey. We’re just trying to be obedient.

Chuck and I will leave you with this for your readers, your viewers … we’re in the same fight. We’re fighting the good fight. Stay firm; stay faithful. Everyone, fight the good fight. In the end, we win.

Father Martins, from your experience as an exorcist recognized by the Vatican, please share your thoughts about Nefarious.

Father Martins: I can say — without hesitation — that it is the best movie portraying demonic possession ever produced. Rather than getting bogged down — like every other movie — in diabolical phenomena and power (levitation, extraordinary strength, and other “same-old” signs), this one brings the viewer into the demonic mind. While the movie trend has focused on displaying demonic rage, Nefarious deftly exhibits the devil’s insatiable craving and formidable intelligence. Far less concerned with ostentation than demonstrating the devil’s thought and intellectual character, the movie accurately depicts how he smothers his victim’s hope.

Astute, careful and intelligent thinking went into its script. Cary Solomon and Chuck Konzelman — the film’s writers, directors and producers — have encapsulated the conundrum into which a demon always presses his victim: “Whether you choose option A or B, you’re damned either way, so cooperate on the Enemy’s terms and choose one. Of course, you are always free to end your life.” Therein is another conundrum. …

The movie is clean and is not a “horror” movie. It has no blasphemies, sex scenes or even four-letter words. However, it is anything but boring. As an exorcist, I can affirm it is true to life and a must-see for anyone who desires to understand the Enemy. I found it gripping. I showed it at the seminary where I live, and the seminarians and priests raved about it for days.

• catholic movies

Joseph Pronechen Joseph Pronechen is staff writer with the National Catholic Register since 2005 and before that a regular correspondent for the paper. His articles have appeared in a number of national publications including Columbia magazine, Soul , Faith and Family , Catholic Digest , Catholic Exchange , and Marian Helper . His religion features have also appeared in Fairfield County Catholic and in major newspapers. He is the author of Fruits of Fatima — Century of Signs and Wonders . He holds a graduate degree and formerly taught English and courses in film study that he developed at a Catholic high school in Connecticut. Joseph and his wife Mary reside on the East Coast.

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‘Nefarious’ (2023) Review – A Thought-Provoking Supernatural Horror Exercise In Morality

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If you have seen the trailer for Nefarious  it is easy to dismiss this film as just another cookie-cutter horror movie to be released during the spring season. You would be making a serious mistake by thinking that.

Nefarious Film Poster

What if I were to tell you that this is a Christian film within the horror genre? Some of you may react negatively because one of the biggest criticisms about modern Christian films is that the portrayals of real life are so overwhelmingly uplifting that it borders on parody.

It is rare to see a Christian film or even a modern Christian sermon that covers the topic of sin. Whenever anyone shines a light on the evils that consume our world every day, people tend to get uncomfortable in the face of defined definitions of right and wrong.

As a result, most Christian content won’t even highlight society’s issues of immorality because the belief is that it’s much easier to win people over being uplifting rather than being truthful.

Not only does this film stand apart with its strong Christian background, but it also eschews the Blum House style of horror films about a cliché portrayal of demons with mediocre plots highlighted by cheap actors that leads to a solid 90 minutes of jump scares. The genre has become so formulaic that audiences don’t even react to it due to its repetitiveness.

Nefarious  is a film that takes a different path altogether.

Jordan Belfi as Dr. James Martin and Tom Ohmer as Warden Moss in Nefarious (2023)

The premise of the film is about a man, Edward Wayne Brady, sitting on death row awaiting the last moments of his life after committing a series of horrible murders.

However, Brady (Sean Patrick Flanery), claims to be a demon as he speaks with psychiatrist Dr. James Martin (Jordan Belfi), who has been ordered to determine whether Brady is mentally fit to withstand execution. Brady, who refers to himself as Nefarious, tells the doctor that by the end of the day he will be responsible for the death of at least three people.

Sean Patrick Flanery as Nefarious in Nefarious

If I were to tell you that this was a Christian film you would be reluctant to believe it but Nefarious is one of the most creative films about faith and the spiritual war on our souls to come out over the last few decades. Nefarious is a character study on the absence of faith and the destruction of it and how one plays into the hands of another.

Everyone reading this has heard of the term “culture wars” when describing the effects that entertainment has on our society. Nefarious lives by the creed that we are not in a “culture war” but a “spiritual war” for the souls of every human being. Forget everything you know about modern horror films when discussing this movie because the rules of secular Hollywood do not apply here.

Nefarious is a thinking man’s movie that relies on the human fears of mortality while questioning various atheistic and secular views of morality all while wrapped in the question of whether Brady is really the demon he claims to be or the ravings of a mad man.

Sean Patrick Flanery is menacing as the character of Nefarious and he sells the seriousness of the plot by making audiences question whether he’s telling the truth about who he is or if he’s actually mentally unstable.

This menacing nature does not rely on camera tricks and jump scares but rather Flanery’s presence and his ability to channel multiple personas. His performance is so well done it will make believers and non-believers question their own morality in the face of direct confrontation with a being claiming to be a demon.

While Flanery’s portrayal as Brady and Nefarious is top notch, his foil, Jordan Belfi also delivers. Belfi plays a psychiatrist who is the straight man for this supernatural encounter and his character, at least in one aspect, represents the secular world coming to terms with the evil he unwittingly helped create or at least created by his willful ignorance.

Sean Patrick Flanery as Edward Wayne Brady/ Nefarious and Jordan Belfi as Dr. James Martin in Nefarious (2023)

To ramp up the intensity between the two, the majority of the film takes place in a one-room two character bottle that relies on gripping audiences with masterful dialogue and a showcase in character-to-character storytelling.

The only downside here is the last 10 to 15 minutes of run time loses its momentum once the one on one character dynamic has been removed from the equation. This causes the story to drag on creating the cinematic equivalent of a rough landing to an otherwise smooth flight.

Jordan Belfi as Dr. James Martin in Nefarious

The Verdict

There are not going to be very many films released this year that are going to make you think on the level of Nefarious . It is a film that is not only entertaining, but also makes you question what side of the battle between good and evil you are truly on.

‘Nefarious’ is one of the best movies to come out in 2023 and at this point should be considered one of the best movies of the year.

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Opinion: Maybe I’m the ‘Nefarious’ target audience, but I wasn’t moved

• Rachelle Chase is a Des Moines Register columnist.

I stumbled upon the movie "Nefarious" and decided to go see it. It wasn’t the movie itself that intrigued me enough to decide to go see it. It was the marketing of the movie.

“Nefarious” is being marketed as a horror film. Though “Christian” and “faith-based” appeared in reviews, the words were missing from the movie description, posters, and theater advertising.

I was curious: How could you omit those words from all marketing, label “Nefarious” a horror movie, and expect non-religious viewers to pick-up its intended message?

So I watched the film, failed to pick up any belief-changing message, then researched what the producers had expected me to.

I was supposed to see deeper meaning in the trailer

On the day of his scheduled execution, a convicted serial killer gets a psychiatric evaluation during which he claims he is a demon, and further claims that before their time is over, the psychiatrist will commit three murders of his own. Synposis of ”Nefarious” from Rotten Tomatoes

More: 'Nefarious' uses horror to tell a faith-based story. But Glenn Beck's cameo is really scary

"Everything in the trailer is in the movie," said Steve Deace, the Des Moines-based nationally syndicated streaming talk show host who is an executive producer of the film, in an interview with The Family Leader . "It’s just not presented in the trailer the way that it actually is in the movie. So everything is being done here subversively. We are attempting to reach an audience that desperately needs the truth of what we believe before it is too late. And they’re going to get it.”

"Subversive" is a scary word. It brings to (my) mind the '80s, when people accused metal bands of hiding satanic messages in songs that they alleged were revealed when vinyl records were played backward. Unless “the truth” Deace wants to share was hidden in the trailer like that, the trailer I watched didn’t seem subversive.

Instead, the trailer seemed like good marketing, piecing together the action clips to add suspense and tension, despite the fact that seemingly 95% of the “action” in the actual movie is talking.

And, boy, do they talk. Nefarious (Sean Patrick Flanery) is a demon who inhabits the body of Edward, whom he has forced to commit 11 murders. Dr. James Martin (Jordan Belfi) is, according to Deace "a left-wing, atheist psychiatrist, because other than Jordan Peterson, there are no other kinds of those, apparently." The two meet in prison on Edward's execution day for Martin to determine if Edward is mentally competent to be executed, and they talk for about 40-plus minutes straight, though it's mainly Nefarious talking and a doubting Martin asking questions.

After 30 minutes, the “worldview” was supposed to make me question my beliefs

“Make no mistake," Deace said in the same interview, "you will see, particularly when you get about 30 minutes into the film, once we feel like the unbeliever is emotionally connected to the story, we flip the script on them, and the worldview of the movie comes out and it flies its colors boldly the whole rest of the film.”

I didn't feel “emotionally connected.” But Flanery's performance as he switched from demon to tortured Edward kept me watching while Belfi’s “fish-out-of-water” reactions to Nefarious kept me slightly amused.

Then I felt the flip of the switch Deace mentioned when Nefarious stopped preaching in generalities and channeled a conservative religious worldview.

More by Rachelle: LGBTQ Ugandans already suffer imprisonment, torture. Now they could face the death penalty.

First was the scene where Nefarious accuses Martin of murdering his elderly mother through "death with dignity, euthanasia, assisted suicide." Then, a long scene where Nefarious beats Martin down on the issue of abortion, instilling a sense of panic and guilt in Martin for his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend's abortion that I didn’t find believable.

Then, there's this dialogue that gets in a culture war dig. Martin makes an idealistic statement that no one I know would ever make in real life: "We've never been freer," he says. "Literacy is at an all-time high. We're working to eliminate racism, intolerance, gender inequality. People can love who they want, be who they want, do what they want. Diversity is no longer a dream, hate speech is no longer tolerated, and politically, we're reclaiming the moral high ground."

Nefarious' rebuttal is weak, directly addressing only literacy before segueing into a disdainful rant that seeks to communicate the screenwriter's opinion instead of addressing Martin's points: "James, the average high school graduate reads at a sixth-grade level. Your basketball players making 30 million a year decrying racism all while wearing sneakers made from slave labor. Here's something for you. Right now. Your world currently has 40 million slaves, more than the Romans had at the height of their empire. Want to know the best part though? Half of those, half, are sex slaves. As for hate speech, you want to hear some irony? We didn't even come up with that one. You did it all by yourself. Sometimes you amaze even us."

Nothing here, nor in the film, posed a compelling argument that caused me to question anything, other than, on occasion trying to follow Nefarious’ stream-of-consciousness reasoning.  

“The truth” was supposed to rock my world.

Was "Nefarious" subversive while I was watching it? That is, as someone who isn’t immersed in conservative Christianity and who knew little beforehand about the people who produced the film, did their “truth” unconsciously infiltrate my psyche and take over my beliefs?

No. Instead, “the truth” went way over my head.

More by Rachelle: Trailblazers & Trendsetters: Basi Affia launches Iowa's first Black comic book company

In a review on Bounding Into Comics , Jacob Smith writes, “Belfi plays a psychiatrist … and his character, at least in one aspect, represents the secular world coming to terms with the evil he unwittingly helped create or at least created by his willful ignorance.”

Really? I totally missed that Belfi represented all that.

“This movie is a thriller," Deace said, "but it is with the intent of grabbing the culture by the throat and saying to them, you’re about right to the lip, man, the tape line of the mouth of madness. If you take one more step, you’re belly-flopping and not coming back.”

OK. I can’t speak to the film’s effects on everybody, but nothing that played out on the screen convinced me of the error of my beliefs or had me perched on the edge of a precipice.

Conclusion: A great movie for conservative Christians, not for me

I think those with a conservative Christian outlook will relate to the world view references, appreciate the novelty of a demon as the messenger, and see "Nefarious" as a movie of great meaning and depth, one they won't forget.

While the acting kept me watching, by the end, I wondered what was the point of what I'd watched. But after watching some conservative talk shows to better understand the intent of what I was supposed to get and want to discuss, I want to un-see "Nefarious," forget it, and get my money back.

Rachelle Chase is an author and an  opinion columnist , who's also launched a new column, Trailblazers & Trendsetters, at the Des Moines Register. Follow Rachelle at facebook.com/rachelle.chase.author   or email her at [email protected] .

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Nefarious Reviews

Apart from a couple of pieces of clumsy foreshadowing, it is hard to tell that we're watching a horror movie, feeling more like a script that Danny Dyer turned down.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Aug 8, 2019

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Turbo movie review: A double-engine Mammootty and nefarious Raj B Shetty shoulder wafer-thin actioner

Turbo movie review: even as the script drags on endlessly, vysakh's movie is predominantly salvaged by mammootty's no-holds-barred performance, operating in top gear, complemented by raj b shetty's remarkable presence as the villain..

“He never begins anything he isn’t sure he can complete,” Indulekha (Anjana Jayaprakash) tells Vetrivel Shanmugha Sundaram (Raj B Shetty) about Jose (Mammootty) with full conviction, despite facing death head-on at that moment. Cinema lovers too can indeed say the same about Mammootty , as, at the age of 72, he has delivered a character that is extremely physically demanding with finesse in director Vysakh’s Turbo , emphasising that if, someday, he is to bid adieu, the thespian will do so only in style.

Turbo opens somewhere in Tamil Nadu during Diwali festivities, where a man and his wife are brutally murdered by some assailants in front of their young son, though the motive is not immediately revealed. The movie then cuts to Idukki, Kerala, where a local man is desperately trying to send Aruvippurath Jose ( Mammootty ) away from the area before the upcoming church feast, fearing his presence would invite trouble. With the help of Jose’s mother Rosakutty (Bindu Panicker), they devise a plan and execute it. However, true to his friends’ words, “What feast without Turbo Jose’s fight,” he returns just in time and gets into an altercation with a few goons.

Cinema Anatomy | Once not adept in comedy, Mammootty tirelessly chiselled himself, bringing to screen the iconic Kottayam Kunjachan, Rajamanikyam and more

Meanwhile, he soon discovers that these goons were sent by the family of his close friend Jerry’s (Shabareesh Varma) girlfriend Indulekha, to deter Jerry from pursuing a relationship with her. Irked, Jose intervenes, but the situation quickly spirals out of control, forcing him to flee to Chennai with Indu and Jerry. Nonetheless, what awaits them there is even worse, as they get entangled in a situation far beyond their capabilities, clashing with political kingmaker Vetrivel after meddling in his business. The remainder of the film focuses on their dilemma: whether to run for their lives or confront Vetrivel face to face.

Unlike typical actioners where the hero is introduced with a fight sequence accompanied by a mass BGM, Jose makes his first appearance while his mother scolds him for his reckless behaviour and his pride in the nickname “Turbo”, earned due to his full-throttle stunts. As a middle-aged man obedient to his elderly mother, Jose is initially shown as an innocent soul. However, once trouble arises, he transforms into Turbo Jose, relentlessly facing his targets until they are defeated. From his first appearance, the movie begins to revolve entirely around Mammootty and he skillfully carries Turbo with his remarkable screen presence. Unfortunately, the megastar’s towering presence is one of the few redeeming qualities in an otherwise thinly plotted film.

Watch Turbo trailer here:

From the outset, Turbo suffers from poor writing, exacerbated by unimpressive moments and “jokes” that mostly don’t land. Despite the instances being all too familiar, none manage to leave an impression or evoke excitement, except for the stunt sequences, which owe their success entirely to the technical team, especially stunt master Phoenix Prabhu. As the film progresses, writer Midhun Manuel Thomas’ script continues to decline, with his attempts to balance mass, comedy and drama mostly backfiring due to consistently weak writing.

As much as the mass and comedy elements lack impact, the script also fails to build tension or do justice to the characters in emotional moments. Several instances that could elevate the emotional and tense atmosphere pass by without evoking any sensation in the viewers due to the shoddy nature of the script and without the technical quality, these shortcomings would have significantly detracted from Turbo’s overall impact.

Cinema Anatomy | 34 films, first State Award, exceptional performances and superstardom: How Mohanlal, at 26, altered the course of his journey in just one year

Making things even worse, almost all characters, including Jose, lack depth and are extremely flat. While Jose is initially presented as a simple and good-hearted villager who knows how to stand his ground, there are moments when his behaviour strays into the supernatural, in terms of fights, only to revert back to his original nature, creating inconsistency. Sometimes he cracks “jokes”, mostly with his mother; then he shares a sentimental story about why he decided that he needed no one in life except his mother; soon afterwards, he would fight off rivals like a seasoned martial artist, leaving one wondering who or what he actually is. While Rosakutty’s character is that of a typical mother to a reckless son, who disciplines him with one hand and pampers him with the other, the narrative fails to explore their bond too thoroughly. Though the movie introduces several characters, such as Jose’s friends, in the beginning, they all disappear immediately, never to be seen again. It would have been nice if the writer had read Chekhov’s gun principle.

Indu is yet another flat character in Turbo, displaying a single expression of perpetual irritation or tension. Though the movie provides ample build-up to Vetrivel, it fails to make him anything more than the typical ruthless villain often found in mass, action movies. Due to these poorly developed characters, Turbo also fails to effectively portray their relationships and bonds, thus not invoking any sympathy or empathy for them from the audience. In fact, without the emotional moment where Jose recounts his mother saving him during a childhood landslide, even their connection would have gone underdeveloped. And what was the purpose of showing that husband and wife being murdered in the beginning itself if they have no significance in the story whatsoever? Guess we’ll never know. Also, the placement of the title following this gruesome murder was an extremely poor artistic choice on the director’s part.

Even as the script drags on endlessly, the movie is predominantly salvaged by Mammootty’s no-holds-barred performance, operating in top gear. Although he falls short of eliciting laughter or tears when necessary, largely due to the weak writing, his mere presence compensates for Turbo’s deficiencies. His appearance and swagger, along with his improved handling of stunts, previously considered a weak point, are indeed commendable. While the script’s attempts to create mass appeal often falter, Mammootty manages to achieve it single-handedly through his expressions and body language.

Simultaneously, Raj B Shetty’s portrayal as the despicable antagonist is exceptional, despite his character lacking depth. With a commanding screen presence and his ability to transcend a character far beyond its limitations, Raj portrays Vetrivel with finesse and if the character had been well-developed, he could have set a benchmark for villains in Malayalam. Interestingly, there are moments when Raj’s natural acting instincts seem to overshadow his simple task of being evil. Although it sometimes feels like he is the only one making an effort to act while others focus just on improving entertainment value, Raj’s approach never goes overboard and ultimately benefits the movie.

While Bindu Panicker delivers a good performance, being the sole source of laughter for audiences in a movie marketed as an action ‘comedy’, Anjana Jayaprakash’s performance falls notably short, largely due to the inadequately written nature of her role. Meanwhile, casting Telugu actor Sunil in the film seemed like a poor choice, especially since the character had little to offer and could have been played by any other actor, even a newcomer.

The manner in which director Vysakh has conceived the world and ensured technical brilliance has significantly saved the film. Thanks to his expertise in crafting mass actioners, Turbo adds another feather to his cap, highlighting that he doesn’t need a strong script to create an engaging entertainer. Without relying on the wafer-thin narrative, Vysakh proceeds in his own style and pace, ensuring with its visuals that the movie doesn’t fail to impress. At the same time, Phoenix Prabhu’s action choreography keeps the movie elevated, with each stunt sequence surpassing the previous one. While Vishnu Sarma’s cinematography is generally impressive, some of the micro shots seemed unnecessary and amateurishly handled. Shameer Muhammed’s exceptional editing stands out, particularly in the action sequences, where Christo Xavier’s high-octane background score also plays a crucial role.

Turbo movie cast: Mammootty, Raj B Shetty, Sunil, Anjana Jayaprakash, Bindu Panicker Turbo movie director: Vysakh Turbo movie rating: 2 stars

Anandu Suresh is a Senior sub-editor at Indian Express Online. He specialises in Malayalam cinema, but doesn't limit himself to it and explores various aspects of the art form. He also pens a column titled Cinema Anatomy, where he delves extensively into the diverse layers and dimensions of cinema, aiming to uncover deeper meanings and foster continuous discourse. Anandu previously worked with The New Indian Express' news desk in Hyderabad, Telangana. You can follow him on Twitter @anandu_suresh_ and write (or send movie recommendations) to him at [email protected]. ... Read More

• film review
• Malayalam Cinema
• Malayalam film industry
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The View 's Alyssa Farah Griffin says she encountered 'creepy and negative' spirit in haunted Capitol building

Griffin said she later learned that someone died in the room "several hundred years ago."

Long before she grappled with sonic phantoms and unknown entities floating through The View airspace, cohost and former Donald Trump staffer Alyssa Farah Griffin has revealed she once encountered a nefarious spirit inside the ( very haunted) Capitol building.

The ex-Washington, D.C. communications professional — who worked for both Mike Pence and Trump — revealed Monday that, in addition to the former president she now regularly criticizes on The View , she had a brush with another nefarious presence inside a government building.

“The White House is known for being haunted and there’s a lot of historic documentation of people encountering ghosts and spirits. I never did there," Griffin told View producer Brian Teta on the Behind the Table podcast, after Teta inquired about Griffin's experience with the supernatural in the historically haunted city.

OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTOGRAPH ARCHIVES; Stefan Zaklin/Getty

“But, the U.S. Capitol is known for being haunted. There, once when I was an intern, we did this tour exploring the basement of the Capitol,” Griffin rememb ered. “There was a room we went into, there was a very creepy and negative energy. We read later there was an assassination of a journalist that had taken place there several hundred years ago. I felt it in the Capitol, not the White House."

Entertainment Weekly has reached out to a representative for The View for more details on Griffin's reported contact with an apparition from another realm.

The 34-year-old's recollection came days after Goldberg — who also previously confirmed on the show that alien beings are "already here" on the planet, watching us — told her cohosts that she knows evil ghosts will absolutely waste no time coming to get you if they really want to.

"Ghosts don't tend to wait. If they don't want you in the house, they will put you out by hook or by crook," the Oscar-winning Ghost actress , who won her Academy Award for playing a medium who communicated with a woman's (Demi Moore) deceased partner (Patrick Swayze) in the 1990 classic, said on the May 13 broadcast.

The View has, however, generated headlines for unexplained happenings on set, like the aforementioned entity wafting near its rafters, or that time a loud noise pierced through a Hot Topics discussion about "hoes."

Sign up for  Entertainment Weekly 's free daily newsletter  to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

Griffin joined The View full-time in 2022, after resigning from Trump's White House in 2020 and subsequently speaking out against him via her public platform.

The View  airs weekdays at 11 a.m. ET on  ABC . Listen to Griffin discuss her experience with the paranormal in the podcast episode above.

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12 thrillers to read this summer

Crime-fiction fans will find these novels as bracing as a plunge in the ocean.

Crime fiction thrives year-round, but summer is an ideal time to plunge into the genre when you’re not in the pool or the ocean. (Or maybe even when you are.) Here are some of the thrillers we’re most looking forward to this season.

‘Assassins Anonymous,’ by Rob Hart

Hart has a knack for high-concept crime fiction. In “The Warehouse” (2019), employees dutifully move boxes around a vast, dismal building, furtively dreaming of a world outside the warehouse and the corporation that owns it. The employees of Assassins Anonymous also live under siege with a nefarious corporation at the helm, and when Mark, our protagonist, joins a 12-step group for former hit men, he learns that life doesn’t have to be one murder after another. But someone would like Mark dead, threatening his newfound no-kill sobriety. (Putnam)

‘Tell Me Who You Are,’ by Louisa Luna

I would rather read about a criminal — or an alleged criminal — who goes to therapy than one who goes to prison. This is more a philosophical stance than a political one. How many variations are there of someone getting shivved, how many recipes for toilet wine? In Luna’s new novel, a Brooklyn prison psychologist, Dr. Caroline Strange — yes, the hero is Dr. Strange — has a shifty client, Nelson Schnack, who declares he’s going to kill someone. Schnack is also possibly involved in the recent disappearance of a woman, and when the cops come to interview Strange, her cagey answers make her a suspect too. When Strange launches an investigation of Schnack, she is shaken to find that he knows secrets of her own — secrets she thought she had buried forever. (MCD)

‘Hall of Mirrors,’ by John Copenhaver

It’s May 1954 in Washington, and paranoia is palpable around water coolers throughout government offices; people are also talking about a serial killer, Adrian Bogdan. Lionel Kane has been fired from the State Department as part of the Lavender Scare, the anti-gay movement led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. Now Kane faces an even graver loss: His lover and writing partner, Roger Raymond, is caught in a fire in Kane’s apartment. Police say suicide, but Kane knows better: Someone is using the Scare as cover for murdering gay men all over the city, depending on their fear to keep them quiet. But Kane is ready to talk. (Pegasus Crime)

‘One of Our Kind,’ by Nicola Yoon

In Yoon’s first adult novel, Jasmyn and King Williams move their family to a Black utopia called Liberty, Calif. As in most utopias, the reality up close is not so ideal. King quickly finds activities to stay occupied, including daily visits to the spalike building central to the community. Jasmyn is primed for thoughtful conversations about race and social-justice work, so she’s less than thrilled when her new neighbors show more interest in comparing waxing appointments than in waxing political. As Jasmyn finds out more about the underbelly of life in Liberty, she becomes concerned. Is her family really among their kind, or somewhere far more dangerous? (Doubleday)

‘Things Don’t Break on Their Own,’ by Sarah Easter Collins

The season of fireflies, twilight bike rides, and beach days punctuated by ice cream and fireworks is also a treacherous time for girls, who disappear at a steady clip in summer-set suspense novels. In Collins’s debut, the heroine is Willa, whose younger sister disappeared 25 years earlier; now she is invited to a dinner party where someone knows what happened. The party is elegant but hazardous. Willa can’t walk away without finding out everything she can about that life-changing night. (Crown)

‘Teddy,’ by Emily Dunlay

Effervescent and cool, “Teddy” is the perfect read if your trip to Capri gets canceled and your “La Dolce Vita” itch needs scratching. Rome’s Via Veneto is lined with paparazzi who capture the antics of the rich and shallow. Teddy Carlyle has come to Italy with a new husband who’s been posted to the American Embassy. She swears she will be a good diplomat’s wife: glamorous, discreet, beautifully attired and relentlessly polite. But at a wild party on July 4th, Teddy sees all the hard work she’s put in trying to be perfect explode like the fireworks in the Roman sky. (Harper)

‘It’s Elementary,’ by Elise Bryant

Beware the PTA power mom. She’s charismatic, rigid, ridiculously energetic and expert at roping other parents into the labyrinth of performative, high-octane parenting common at elite schools. Bryant comes from the world of young-adult fiction, where she was one of the few Black writers taking on the complex issues facing Black families. In “It’s Elementary,” she mixes parental insanity with a sly mystery about a missing school principal. Bryant raises excellent questions about access to education while delivering a novel with hefty portions of both suspense and satire. (Berkley)

‘What We’ll Burn Last,’ by Heather Chavez

Two teenagers go missing in the Sierra Nevada foothills, never to be seen again. Leyna Clarke longs to know about the vanishing; one of those teens was her sister, Grace. Sixteen years later, when a woman who looks a lot like Grace turns up and then vanishes, Leyna becomes determined to either find her sister or find out what happened. Catering to interest in the high number of teenage runaways and missing people, Chavez delivers a nuanced story of fiery secrets. (Mulholland)

‘Hum,’ by Helen Phillips

“Hum” tosses climate change, robots and our addiction to devices into its dystopian but not desolate world. After a woman named May loses her job to AI, she has no choice but to participate in an experimental study in which her face will be altered so she can’t be identified by ubiquitous surveillance cameras. Trying to spend some time with her family before the procedure, May takes her husband and two kids on a three-night trip to an idyllic botanical garden, one of the few settings left where her kids can play in a stream and not be tempted by devices, as they are not permitted. But the garden isn’t safe, either. Has she destroyed her family instead of saving it? (Marysue Rucci)

‘The Divide,’ by Morgan Richter

Looking for a fast-paced Hollywood tale of stardom and grifters? “The Divide” is coming to a bookstore near you. Jenny St. John is an actress on the rise. She has scored the leading role in an indie film (“The Divide”) directed by an auteur named Serge Grumet. But when the movie bombs, Jenny finds herself in worse and worse straits, until she is living off a low-level grift as a fake psychic life coach. When Serge, also on the decline, is murdered, Jenny teams up with his ex-wife, a painter who looks a lot like Jenny, to solve mysteries that pile up as the pages turn. (Knopf)

‘I Need You to Read This,’ by Jessa Maxwell

In a sea of influencers, TikTok millionaires and vloggers, Alex Marks does not seek attention. She just wants to do her dull copywriting job, drinking weak coffee from the diner downstairs and avoiding small talk. Her quiet life is upended when her writing hero, advice columnist Francis Keen, is murdered. Alex impulsively applies for and gets Keen’s old job. It’s not long before she is investigating Keen’s death: If suddenly the shy and sullen Alex is big byline material, does that mean she is in danger too? And the letters coming into the column are getting super creepy. (Atria)

‘House of Bone and Rain,’ by Gabino Iglesias

Pour a large glass of horror master Stephen King with a jigger of spicy Don Winslow and garnish with a splash of magical realism, and you have Iglesias’s latest, a tall, tasty cocktail. Five boys, childhood pals, are surrounded by ghosts, violence and accidents. The book’s “Stand By Me”-like setup turns into a vigilante tale when one of their mothers is shot and killed. The highly skilled Iglesias draws on the familiar without any worry that it might not be freshly frightening. Puerto Rican drug dealers, hurricanes, evil spirits and revenge are all ingredients in this potent novel. (Mulholland)

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‘Butcher’ Tells the (Mostly) True Story of a Very Bad Gynecologist

Through the lens of a 19th-century doctor, Joyce Carol Oates explores gothic medical horror.

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Daphne Merkin’s most recent book is the novel “22 Minutes of Unconditional Love.” She is currently at work on a memoir about psychoanalysis.

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BUTCHER, by Joyce Carol Oates

There are many things one could note about Joyce Carol Oates’s long writing career — including, most strikingly, its legendary prolificness. Gifted with a protean talent, she has shifted with ease from one literary genre to another, be it novels, short stories, memoir, poetry, children’s books, essay collections, plays or librettos.

To the envy, admiration and annoyance of less fluent authors, Oates has clearly never suffered from writers’ block. When she is not writing in longhand, she is busy on X and Substack, airing her opinions on Donald Trump and the events of the day. For a time she also wrote suspense under two different pseudonyms.

Indeed, there is something almost compulsive, verging on the hypergraphic, about her need to write. It seems to come to her as readily as breathing, and leaves one wondering whether she ever stops long enough to brew a cup of tea. (One of her few diversions is running.) Now 85, Oates shows no sign of slowing down: “Butcher” is, by most accounts, her 63rd novel, and the book has the feverish energy, narrative propulsion and descriptive amplitude — sometimes to excess — of much of her earlier work.

Even when Oates isn’t writing in an explicitly Gothic mode, as she did in “Bellefleur” (1980) or “My Heart Laid Bare” (1998), she has always been interested in intimations of the sinister, the way it suddenly hoves into view on an ordinary summer day. “At the periphery of many of my poems and works of fiction, as in the corner of an eye,” she once observed in an essay, “there is often an element of the grotesque or surreal.”

The title of “Butcher,” the very starkness of it, gives a clue to the lurid, bloody tale Oates has in store. Like several previous works (her seminal 1966 short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” and the 1992 Chappaquiddick reimagining “Dark Water,” for example), it is inspired in part by real figures who committed real crimes — including, in this case, an undertrained doctor named J. Marion Sims, who in the 1840s began performing experimental surgeries on women recovering from difficult childbirths.

Here, the “Butcher” of the title is now called Silas Aloysius Weir, who for 35 years oversees the New Jersey State Asylum for Female Lunatics, where conditions range from abysmal to horrifying. His medical instruction is minimal, consisting of only four months of training at an inferior school, though he is happy to tell everyone that he comes from a distinguished family (one of his uncles is a renowned astronomer at Harvard, from which two brothers have also graduated; Weir seems to be the bad egg).

Silas becomes heralded and then ultimately detested as a pioneer in the field of gyno-psychiatry, through which misogynistic scrim he views the vagina as “a veritable hell-hole of filth & corruption” and the female genitals as “loathsome in design, function & aesthetics.”

It is a time when the seat of hysteria is thought to be the uterus, and pesky clitorises — “the offensive little organ at the mouth of the vagina … like a miniature male organ, with an obscene fire lit from within” — are held accountable for obstreperous behavior in young women and snipped without a second thought. Various ailments are treated, without aid of anesthetic, by scalpel and sometimes a shoemaker’s awl, and the most frequent cure-all is phlebotomy, or bloodletting (“ When in doubt, bleed ”), even if in many cases it causes death. The arsenal of drugs includes laudanum, foxglove, mercury, belladonna, “small quantities of arsenic” and cocaine drops.

“Butcher” is told by different narrators, all of whom cast alternating lights on Weir and his God-given (or so he believes) commitment to the patients in his care. From the start, we are given a sense of his unease and unattractiveness: “His head was overlarge on his stooped & spindly shoulders; his stiff-tufted hair of no discernible hue … his eyes rather deep-set in their sockets, like a rodent’s eyes, damp & quick-shifting.” (Reading, I wondered whether a rodent’s eyes are, in fact, deep-set; from the little I have spotted of them, their eyes seemed flat against their heads. But that is a quibble.)

When his use of a pair of pliers to reposition a 5-month-old’s cranial plates results in the infant’s death — even though he relieves his guilt by noting her “very poor stock, virtually subhuman” — Weir is forced to leave his community. Shortly thereafter, he is called to the asylum, where, relying on the assistance of an experienced midwife, he delivers a baby for an orphaned albino Irish servant named Brigit, who is also purportedly deaf and mute. (The child, naturally, is immediately taken from her.)

Eventually, Brigit becomes his assistant, and Weir becomes obsessed with her otherworldly beauty — “Those staring eyes! The faintest blue, uncanny” — believing that there is a special unspoken communion between them. One of those men whose ignorance is matched by his arrogance, he hopes to achieve worldwide fame by finding a way to cure madness by literally cutting it out of the body, and as the novel proceeds, his approach becomes only more brazen. He uses a tarnished tablespoon for intimate examinations as well as heated forceps, confident in his knowledge that “the interior of the vagina is known to be insensitive to sensation, like the birth canal. There are no nerve endings in these organs.”

His ambitions seem limited only by what he can achieve in a series of increasingly depraved experiments, conducted in his private laboratory. Finally, though, the inmates revolt, in a scene that Oates delineates with grotesque specificity. “Butcher” is undoubtedly one of her most surreal and gruesome works, sparing no repulsive detail or nefarious impulse.

In the end, though, the purview of the novel is larger than one might think, becoming an empathic and discerning commentary on women’s rights, the abuses of patriarchy and the servitude of the poor and disenfranchised. Oates, as is her wont, succeeds in creating a world that is apart from our own yet familiar, making it impossible to dismiss her observations about twisted natures and random acts of violence.

My prevailing question about Oates is where her imaginative fantasies derive from, which has always seemed a mystery to me. We don’t get a sense of who she is behind her writing the way we do with, say, John Updike, John Cheever or Alice Munro . But this unyielding impersonality may be the way that she wants it: In the same essay collection I quoted from earlier, she offers, “Elsewhere I’ve stated that JCO is not a person, not even a personality, but a process that has resulted in a series of texts.”

We have become so used to the notion of the recognizable auteur blazing through the artifice of fiction and calling attention to his or her self that Oates’s approach — not dissimilar from the novelist Gustave Flaubert’s insistence that “an author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere” — feels like a singularly uncommon one. Long may she run.

BUTCHER | Joyce Carol Oates | Knopf | 352 pp. | $30

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An assault led to Chanel Miller’s best seller, “Know My Name,” but she had wanted to write children’s books since the second grade. She’s done that now  with “Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All.”

When Reese Witherspoon is making selections for her book club , she wants books by women, with women at the center of the action who save themselves.

The Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro, who died on May 14 , specialized in exacting short stories that were novelistic in scope , spanning decades with intimacy and precision.

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Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

‘The Last Stop in Yuma County’ Casting Director Talks Assembling Film’s ‘Dream Cast’ and Why He Enjoys Working With First-Time Directors

By Jenelle Riley

Jenelle Riley

Deputy Awards and Features Editor

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Is it fair to say you specialize in genre or thriller films?

I think so. I definitely don’t get a lot of comedies or romance movies sent my way – though I would love that. I think my love of the genre probably attracts people with similar sensibilities. But I also have an awareness of the market – all these movies are going because of the cast. So, all the elements have to be correct. You need the right actor and the right type of project with the right director and then I can help figure out how much we’re going to make this movie for. I can develop them and assist in the financing.

This is an odd question, but for actors auditioning for a horror or thriller, do you have a way to select material to showcase how they’ll have to look scared or in peril? Or is that not a factor? I’m just looking for people who really embody the character, who feel present and nuanced and intense the way people do in these situations. So, I always like them to have the full script. I don’t believe in actors reading things out of context. I will always push for that. Sometime actors come in and I’ll say, “Did you read the script?” and they’ll say, “You know, I kind of skimmed it.” I really expect you to know what’s happening.

Broad question, but what else do you like to see in auditions? I prefer people to be standing, even if it says in the script that they’re sitting. There’s just a different energy when you’re standing. I would avoid props; I would avoid anything that is unnecessary, like a specific costume. Just understand the material and embody the character as much as possible. It’s about trying to be as comfortable as possible.

Obviously, self-tapes have changed things, but when we were in the room, I always wanted to give everyone enough time. I don’t like to pack the waiting room. So, I want people to know they have time to get comfortable, and the first couple can be throw-away reads to just get the dust off it. When I’m reading with them, I would always be off book, I’d memorize the lines of the other character so they’re not acting with a brick wall. That sometimes surprises people, but if I’m going to ask for this kind of commitment from them, I also want to be committed. I never want anyone to feel rushed out of the room. When it comes to self-tapes, I try to watch every single tape or at least parts of it. I have hundreds and I might know early on if someone isn’t right, but I will always press play on every single one. I feel there’s a promise made if an actor takes the time to make a tape, that I can watch it.

What’s one of your favorite casting discovery stories? I met Isabel May when she was 17. She came in and read for “Run Hide Fight,” which took a long time to make because it was about a sensitive subject: a school shooting. She was one of the first people to audition and had this presence I really sparked to. But as a casting director, I had to do my due diligence and see everyone. We spent years trying to get the movie made and saw hundreds – if not thousands – of people for the role. In the end, she got it, and it was her first movie. It was like seeing Jennifer Lawrence for the first time. And she’s since gone on to star in “1883” and “1923” and just continues to amaze.

You also seem to be drawn to first-time directors. It’s a big passion of mine. I was very inspired by Roger Corman, who just passed away. I want to create environments where directors can make their movie and have the freedom to pick their choice of cast and get final cut because they made it at the right price. That’s what Francis was able to do with “Yuma County.” This industry has a way of pushing directors to the side and letting suits make the decisions. And I don’t want someone as talented as Francis to be discouraged and not make movies. I’ve seen that happen and I want to put a bubble around those people and make them feel creatively supported in every way.

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