There’s a lot of awful horror movie dads that come to mind around Father’s Day every year. Everett McGill’s “Man” from The People Under the Stairs or Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance from The Shining, for example. There’s also good horror movie dads like John Krasinski in A Quiet Place or Thomas Jane in The Mist (okay, he’s maybe a bit impatient in the end). But the duality of Bill Paxton’s “Dad” from 2002’s Frailty is quite the jagged little pill to swallow.
In the film, Paxton plays a widowed father to two young boys in a small town in Texas in 1979. He initially seems like a decent man and good father who goes to work everyday and comes home to have dinner and spend time with his kids. That is, of course, right up until he wakes them up one night to let them know an angel has informed him that they will be spending the remainder of their lives hacking folks up with an axe together. All with the demeanor of someone who’s just decided to switch cable companies, not become “heaven’s hitmen.”
I joke, but maybe the most haunting thing about 2001’s forever underrated Bill Paxton directorial debut Frailty is this very moment. They way these kids’ normal lives are just thrown into the pits of darkness and despair at a moment’s notice while sleeping safely in their beds is deeply unsettling. Add to it that this news is being delivered happily and lovingly by the most trusted person in their lives. Frailty doesn’t spare them their anxieties, either. Every bit of his warning becomes reality as the kids are forced to take part in the capture, murder, dismemberment and disposal of human beings that dear old dad believes to be demons.
Paxton and writer Brent Hanley do an amazing job of translating this feeling of childhood helplessness to the audience. Regardless of how things turn out story wise in the end (I’m not here to spoil a movie with such gnarly twists and turns), it’s truly frightening to watch a man who was completely normal yesterday now see fiery angels delivering him kill-lists at work. Or seeing sunbeams as signs from God directing him into a stranger’s barn to collect magic weaponry. It feels like a frighteningly accurate depiction of experiencing someone have a mental break where every common occurrence becomes some sort of synchronicity affirming their current beliefs. Not to mention, the imagery in these moments that could so easily be overdone or corny instead seems hauntingly trapped between the real world and the delusions of a madman.
When the older kid, Fenton (Matt O’Leary), refuses to go along with his father’s delusion, it only adds fuel to the heartbreaking fire of Frailty. He has to watch as his little brother Adam (Jeremy Sumpter) fully buys into the madness; he’s too young to see his father’s word as anything but literal gospel. Finally, a boiling point is reached when dad’s angel begins to whisper to him that Fenton himself is damned to become a demon that must be dealt with. This could easily end with a Shining level axe chase but Paxton instead uses emotional agony as his weapon. Dad decides to pull the demon out of Fenton using suffering; forcing him to dig a ten foot deep dungeon for his victims and eventually throwing him inside it for days after an attempt to tell the police.
Did I mention that amidst all of this awful darkness, Frailty is somehow shockingly entertaining? The aforementioned story is bookended by a fascinating dialogue between the incomparable Powers Boothe as FBI Agent Wesley Doyle and Matthew McConaughey as one of the adult kids (who also narrates the film). From the casting to the authentic feel of the small town country atmosphere, to capturing how helpless kids can be to the ideas of their parents, I’m taken back by the surprising ingenuity of Frailty every time I watch.
None of this would work without Bill Paxton both in front of and behind the camera. As a director he found a way to use the film’s lack of budget as an asset. You come away feeling as though you’ve spent its entirety isolated from the real world and more specifically in his backyard shed-o-death. What it probably feels like to grow up in a small town back then, when your parents may as well have been God. As an actor he has such a stern charisma in his performance. You just know if you were his kid, you’d probably want to believe him too; but that it also wouldn’t matter because he’s your father and you’ll do what you’re told. There’s a lot of subtlety that goes into a performance like that. I think it goes unsung that many couldn’t pull off what was such an essential cog to the entire experience. Bill Paxton was an absolute masterclass in acting.
For a story based in such a simple, small town atmosphere, there sure is a lot going on genre-wise in Frailty. There’s religious horror, abduction, axe-murder, parental horror, dismemberment, crime, thriller, mystery, mental illness and multiple twists and turns in the mix. Not to mention this is all loosely based on the true crime story of Joseph Kallinger, who committed heinous crimes with his thirteen year old son, eventually claiming God had directed him to do so. Perhaps the wide genre scope of Frailty is why it often seems forgotten when 2000s horror is mentioned. All I know is that when it comes up in conversation with anyone I know who has seen it? The response is often something like, “Oh yeah! That movie was great! I forgot about that one.”
Let’s not forget about Frailty anymore, eh?
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