This Film is Either Very Smart or Very Dumb (Major Spoilers)
First of all, I do like that this definitely wasn't your typical movie about a religious nutjob, even if it seemed that way at first. We know they exist, we know how traumatizing and damaging growing up in a household like that can be, we've seen it done before in countless movies and stories to the point where it's almost cliche. This on the other hand went in the opposite direction, it was extremely different, I'll give it that, I don't think I've seen a film quite like it. The twist ending is dropped on you like a bomb, I would love to know who saw the whole thing coming and how, because I don't know how it could be considered predictable. Let me be clear, I suspected that the brother could easily be the wrong brother from the get-go, and that he could be planning to kill the cop, but what I didn't see coming was the (no pun intended) revelation that the killers were actual demon slayers instead of just psychos.
What I also liked was that despite portraying the father and son as justified in their actions, it maintained the same uneasy atmosphere right until the credits, even when Sheriff Adam walks outside into the sunlight and tells the FBI agent he's a good man and then says "praise God", there's no sentimentality to it, it's very matter of fact - this is the way things are, like it or not, and it ends on a very unsettling note. These people actually were demons, the dad's visions were true, end of story. I just sat there frowning for about five minutes. Initially I suspected the movie was a criticism of blind faith, but then it basically states that their blind faith was accurate, so I suspected it was a criticism of Divine Command Theory or at least an exploration of what the world would be like if the theory became a reality. I don't know, was it?
If Fenton was a demon, why did he have such a huge problem with the original sheriff dying? I can see him being uncomfortable with other demons being destroyed or having to destroy a fellow demon himself (although even then I'd be doubtful, surely evil wouldn't care about anything or anyone), but he was thoroughly disturbed by the sheriff's death and he was human. Was he unaware that he was a demon, or was it perhaps all an act to discourage the father from his "mission"? Why this particular family over others? Why didn't God just kill the demons himself, was it a test of faith? Why would faith need to be tested when an omniscient deity would know the outcome of any test even before it was conducted? If the demons don't know they're demons, how could they be held responsible?
Eh, these are issues one gets into with Christianity in general so I suppose it's natural that they would inevitably go hand in hand with a movie which postulates the existence of the Christian deity, perhaps I'm being unfair since the film wasn't exactly responsible for coming up with this logic, it just adopted it as part of a story. Adam does say at the beginning that "sometimes truth defies reason", but come on... that's a cop out.
Maybe it's a movie that's intelligent but brought down by the uh... frail... logic it had to work with in the first place. What do you think?
"I have no idea what "hammer time" is. Or how it differs from regular time."