Recently I watched a movie about demons. Ostensibly it was about evil and the effect that evil had on a family. The plot involved a serial killer, his father, and his younger brother. The father and brother were also serial killers, but they claimed to be destroying demons under the direct command of God rather than killing human beings.
The older brother, in contrast, made no moral claims. The movie allows us to interpret him as a more or less normal child who was psychologically destroyed by the experience of living with, and finally killing, a pathological father.
You might suppose that my synopsis fully indicates just how messed up this movie plot could become, but you would be wrong.
As the movie progresses, more and more details hint at some sort of reality to the father's claim to be executing divine justice. At first we move have only unsupported statements about visions of angels, revealed lists of names of targets, and references to evil perpetrated by the targets (that is, by the supposed demons). Step by step we move from this to knowing details of child murder and the other targets' crimes and the inexplicable failure of surveillence camera to record the demon-killer's face.
The audience should discount most of these hints because they are presented by the younger brother who, as we said, is making the same claim for himself. The camera failure, by itself, would be inconclusive. What finally requires our attention is the younger brother identifying the FBI agent as a matricide and the agent's apparent, implied confession.
Here, then, is the crux of the problem. If the father and younger brother are merely psychopathic, how are these revelations about their victims to be explained? (Not to the mention the TV monitor.) One would need to step outside of the artistic evidence and make up an explanation from whole cloth. That might be the most believable result, but it would say nothing about the movie's message.
On the other hand, if they truly are sent by God, if the father's self-interpretation is true, then the evils that are being addressed were performed by demons who are not human beings. If this were so, then we have done away with human sin, repentence, forgiveness, and salvation. Besides that, we do not know the God who is being portrayed by the film, a God who acts through lies and killing, in secret.
A third possibility is that the father was never in touch with God but that the evil-doers were revealed to him by the devil. The demons are destroying each other. We would then quote Jesus quoting the proverb that a house divided against itself cannot stand.
It is the movie which cannot stand. Technically competent and psychologically engaging, but it's intellectual foundation is vapor. The plot presumes aspects of Christian theology but then proceeds in contrary directions. It cannot stand within the logic of Christian revelation nor can it stand on its own, without Christianity as its background.
Here is a movie about evil which says nothing about evil. It is well enough done that this is a disappointment.