Bill's one bad, mad daddy

The complex relationship between father and son is evidently this year's big theme in Hollywood. Sam Mendes's forthcoming Road to Perdition attempts to explore the conflicting loyalties between a good son and a bad father - or rather, a good father who does bad things.

Actor Bill Paxton's movie takes a similar theme while exploring a landscape entirely different from Road to Perdition. Taking the reins as director for the first time, Paxton tells the story of a divinely demented father whose peculiar form of psychotic contagion infects his two young sons.

By not condescending to its B-movie origins, Paxton's film emerges with great credit. With Paxton himself playing the single-parent widower and father of two young boys there is an assurance about the work that - while never springing any great surprises on us - delivers a highly satisfactory movie full of psychological frisson whose impact is substantial. And by keeping faith with the material, Paxton takes us on a trip that is genuinely terrifying.

Opening with a decidedly creepy montage of newspaper cuttings - about a killer stalking Texas who has been dubbed "God's Hand" - the film quickly establishes its ground. FBI agent Wesley Doyle (Powers Boothe) receives a call that a man has walked into his office claiming he knows the identity of the killer. Almost immediately, a man claiming to be Fenton Meiks (Matthew McConaughey) reveals that his brother Adam is the murderer and then sets out to explain why.

Told in flashback, the story reveals the history of the Meiks family and how the two boys were brought up by their loving father (Bill Paxton), a hardworking local mechanic.

For reasons we can only guess at, Dad (he is never named) wakes the boys one night to tell them he has had a visitation from an angel who has given him a mission to destroy demons. He later produces a list of names whom he claims are demons in disguise, as well as the sacred weapons - an axe and a heavy pipe. The younger brother, Adam, believes his father implicitly, but Fenton suspects, not without reason, that Dad has gone totally tonto. The internal conflict is set up with economy: brother against brother, son against father. The complication is the vestigial love and respect Fenton has for his father-thatusedto-be.

When Dad starts bringing home the "demons" - just a succession of frightened people trussed and gagged - for destruction in the freshly dug cellar, the fantasy turns into a horrifying reality and even Fenton's rebelliously innocent mind is turned. Or is it?

The film's structure is like a simplified version of The Usual Suspects: the more the story is revealed the less certain we are of the facts. Paxton's skill is to suggest a number of possibilities while in the process of revealing the action. His use of dark interiors, heavy shadow, uncomfortable close-ups and bone-crunching sound effects suggests far more than we see (the lack of graphic violence leaves the imagination to do its worst) and also lays a trail of clues to the psychology of the characters.

His coup de gr?ce is to deliver a twist - which attentive viewers will have anticipated early on - followed quickly by another, which is far less obvious but none the less embedded from the start.

Throughout the film small details occur that shift the emphasis, skirmishing with the unpredictable; it is established that the flashback action is set in the 1970s when the two boys argue about which movie they want to see - Meatballs or The Warriors. Among the innocent
victims of Dad's rampage is a detestable misogynistic bigot - which invites the uncomfortable response that here is someone who actually deserves his divinely inspired vengeance.