NEFARIOUS

If you're an adult who can sit through hard things without harm to your conscience, yes — this is one of the sharpest Christian thrillers to come along in a while. It's essentially two men in a room, trading verbal blows, and it's riveting from start to finish. The script has real twists. The performances carry the whole picture. And underneath the horror is a genuinely orthodox message: God is more powerful than the enemy, and prayer works.

But the caution is real, not decorative. The execution scene is extremely intense — not gratuitous exploitation, but genuinely hard to watch. There's an abortion a man fails to prevent, three light obscenities, and long stretches of a man claiming to be a demon that are meant to unsettle you, and do.

This isn't for family movie night, and it isn't for anyone sensitive to graphic depictions of execution or demonic menace. For adults who can handle it, though, it delivers both craft and conviction. Worth the trip — adults only.

A psychiatrist commits suicide. His replacement, Dr. James Martin, is sent into a prison to determine whether a condemned serial killer, Edward Wayne Brady, is sane enough to be executed that same night. He has until 4 p.m. to decide.

But Brady tells him something strange: the man Martin is really talking to isn't Brady at all. It's a demon calling itself Nefarious, who claims to have possessed Brady in stages since childhood. Skeptical, Martin demands proof that he's really talking to a demon. He gets far more than he asked for — and that's where we'll stop.

Four stars means this is the real thing — craft, not just conviction. Almost the entire movie is two men in a room, doing verbal battle, and that's a hard structure to sustain for ninety-eight minutes. Sean Patrick Flanery and Jordan Belfi make it work; both performances carry real weight, and the direction keeps a dialogue-heavy story tense throughout.

The script itself is the star. It's well-written, with a few genuine twists that land, and dramatic dialogue that never feels like filler between the scares. The result is an intense, spooky thriller that earns its intensity rather than manufacturing it.

This is a strongly, deliberately Christian film — and it argues its case through drama rather than sermon. A skeptical secular psychologist walks in convinced he's dealing with mental illness and walks out with his skepticism seriously shaken. When a character appeals to God for help against demonic power, God answers — a plain, unembarrassed miracle in response to an informal prayer. The film's demon, for his part, openly names Satan as his master and voices real jealousy, hostility, and hatred toward God, Christ, and mankind — the film doesn't soften evil's self-understanding of itself.

What's notable is what the film doesn't do: nobody has an altar-call conversion. Faith is discussed, skepticism about faith is refuted, but the movie trusts its audience to draw the conclusion rather than forcing it. That restraint, paired with an ending that resolves through what can only be called an Act of God, makes the theology land harder, not softer.

The film's engine is an old, true truth: the enemy is real, and he is still outmatched. "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil" (Ephesians 6:12) — and against all of them, "greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world" (1 John 4:4).

Nefarious is proof that a Christian thriller can be both faithful and genuinely well-made — smart, tense, and unafraid to let its theology do real work. It's also, by design, not for the faint of heart or the family couch. Our answer stands: worth the trip — adults only. Looking for something for the whole family instead? Start with our latest family-friendly picks.