Frailty

Aroview: After a spiritual visitation, Bill Paxton and his two young sons take an axe to unsuspecting “evil-doers” in the late 1970s, while unreliable witness Matthew McConaughey narrates from the present day.

An unsettling gothic melodrama that could only be set in the Deep South, Bill Paxton’s directing debut has been admired for its bleak tone and originality, but where it promises to explore the disturbing implications of religious exploitation and the impressionability of children, it is instead consumed with a more conventional agenda to set the scene for some fancy plot-twists.