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Actor Bill Paxton (Twister, Aliens) makes his feature directorial debut with Frailty, in which a man recounts to an FBI agent how, as a boy, his religious-freak father forced him and his young brother to help murder alleged ‘demons’ and bury their bodies. Matthew McConaughey plays the storyteller, Powers Boothe plays the FBI agent, and Bill Paxton plays the scary dad in the flashback-driven majority of the movie.

The initial ‘religious vision’ that Paxton’s character experiences requires a leap of faith (no pun intended) on the viewer’s part, but if you run with it Frailty will take you to some scary places. As someone terrified of organized religion and blind faith, I particularly appreciated seeing the terrifying lengths to which a father would go to torture — I mean, purify — his own son in the name of the Lord. Paxton’s performance isn’t entirely convincing, but his directing is pretty solid. The child actors, Matt O’Leary and Jeremy Sumpter, are very natural.

As much as I like the first two-thirds of Frailty, it begins to fall apart in the final act, trying to be too much like The Sixth Sense and other twisty narratives that were so popular in the late ’90s and early ’00s. The film is fresh, original, and interesting for so long, and then the ending throws the film off balance with some unnecessary surprises that undermine our emotional attachment to the characters.