Bill Paxton gets off to a problematic start in his directorial debut, opening Frailty with a scene that proves to be a complete fraud. An edgy creep who says he’s Adam Meiks (Matthew McConaughey) corners FBI agent Wesley Doyle (Powers Boothe) in his office claiming to know the identity of the serial killer called "God’s Hand." He insists it’s his brother Fenton (Levi Kreis), whose suicide, shown in flashback, he has just witnessed. Before you can say "unreliable narrator," Adam unloads a low-rent Flannery O’Connor tale of how years ago his dad (Paxton) snapped one day and got it into his head that he had a mission from God to destroy "demons." Enlisting his two young boys, dad kidnaps strangers and dispatches them with mounting grotesquerie, until Adam, like his namesake, rebels, but . . .

Paxton doesn’t shy from cheap thrills (this film takes the endangered-child device to new depths of queasiness) or gross deception. His manipulativeness, layered with foggy atmospherics, at first stirs a disorienting ambiguity (who’s nuts? who’s evil?) but soon degenerates into tedious misdirection (whodunit? who cares?). When it comes to being straight with the audience, frailty, thy name is Paxton.