This Tennessee-set Southern Gothic tale gets you thinking about Flannery O'Connor and Erskine Caldwell, what with its intensely felt religiosity and its gallery of sexually-bent grotesques. But there's a sweetness and tenderness too in this story of Cornelius (Michael Tully), a Jesus lookalike who is actually a depressed, drugged-out ex-football star. He returns to his family farm after 18 years, uniting with one brother, Ezra (Robert Longstreet), who bakes cookies and yearns to wear a dress, and another, Amos (Onur Tukel), who compulsively draws pornographic images and worries if he's a homosexual. What can be done with this unhappy home? Enter a self-appointed minister with messianic impulses. He arranges a magnificent exorcism, leading to a bright new morning. The title of the movie is inscrutable, and the actors are nobody you know. But director-writer-star Michael Tully has forged an original independent work of spirit and intelligence, perhaps the best American feature so far in 2011.
