Seen any good movies lately? Nefarious

I’m so glad you asked. After weeks of trying and failing to see it in the theater my precious wife and I were able to download and watch Nefarious last night. I am both an enjoyer of movies and a critic, having served as a judge for the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival for the length of its roughly ten year existence. Like many humans, including Christian humans, I often have a beef with Christian movies. As a general rule they start with a premise, an idea. It may be a perfectly wonderful idea, “Jesus saves sinners,” or “Moral relativism is absurd.” Those are two ideas I’m deeply committed to. Starting the process with the premise, however, is how you make a sermon, not a movie. It’s tough. If you either hide the premise or do not have one, how is the movie any different from the world’s movie? If you lead with it, how is it not an illustration rather than a story?

Nefarious has a message. The message is worn on its orange sleeve. It is clearly and distinctively Christian. But it’s also a whiz-bang story. An atheist shrink is sent to death row to certify the sanity of a serial killer whose execution is just hours away. Said serial killer claims to be possessed by a demon, Nefarious. The great bulk of the movie is simply these two talking. No sophisticated sets. No car chases. No CGI. No stunts. Just two persons talking. Yet, you can’t take your eyes off the screen. Both men are outstanding actors (another weakness of Christian film is their propensity use actors who are either as hammy as Miss Piggy or as stiff as a carboard cutout of Miss Piggy.) I felt like I was there, listening in. I, from the beginning, was itching to know how the story would end. I wasn’t disappointed.

While the movie wasn’t preachy it did leave me better than it found me. It communicated one biblical truth that Christians too often overlook, the reality of spiritual warfare. We do not wrestle with mere ideologies, temptations, opposing voting blocs, but with principalities and powers. I don’t believe Nefarious is trying to answer that question, “Exactly how are these battles fought” but rather sounding the alarm that they are indeed being fought, whether we acknowledge it or not. It reminds us as well there is no bright shining line between political policy disputes and spiritual battles. To fight the one is to fight the other; to be passive in the one is to be passive in the other.

The movie is a kind of prequel to the book The Nefarious Plot by Steve Deace. Steve is a political commentator on The Blaze, after spending decades in local talk radio in Iowa. Steve is also the co-author Faucian Bargain and author of The Rise of the Fourth Reich: Confronting Covid Fascism among other books. He is the executive producer of the film, and a friend of mine from years back. Check it out, whatever outlet you can find it. We rented it from Amazon. And let me know (and Rotten Tomatoes) what you think.