This showed up on a few lists as one of the highlights of the horror movies available on Netflix. It is an interesting find, and for a fairly unknown movie, it's pretty good.
The pacing is fairly slow, but it's timed very well. Odd little developments happen at just the right rate to keep you interested. The strange elements ramp up gradually, until some really strange stuff happens about 3/4 of the way through the picture.
And that's where things really shift. The first half of the movie is solidly a personal exploration of this man's marriage and his relationship to his kid, and to his friend. At a certain point, it moves into a cult-based sense of horror, a la The Wicker Man.
What's unusual about this, and a bit frustrating, is how little we learn about what's going on. We have to piece together what we can, but it doesn't seem to be quite enough. There are no clear explanations. Regardless, it still works pretty well because of the strange, compelling characterizations from earlier in the movie.
Around halfway through, I realized that this reminded me of The Ninth Gate. Things were a little more explicit in that, and the ending seemed very well managed as it came about, but there's a similar theme in this one, of a fairly normal, moderately evil man being seduced into being a more supremely evil person.
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