Producers: Erik Feig, Jessica Switch, Julianne Moore, Bart Freundlich, Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka   Director: Benjamin Caron   Screenplay: Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka   Cast: Julianne Moore, Sebastian Stan, Justice Smith, Briana Middleton, John Lithgow   Distributor: A24/Apple+

Grade: C

The secret to the con, on screen as in real life, is to keep the mark guessing.  (Just ask George Santos.)  There’s always room for a brilliantly twisty puzzler on screen, “The Usual Suspects” being the gold standard and “Glass Onion” a recent success story.  And back-stabbing con-men and women can be great characters—witness “The Grifters.”  Screenwriter Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka try their hand at the genre in “Sharper,” but though the film is about con piled upon con, the attempt at subterfuge doesn’t prove clever enough to keep the mark—the viewer in this case—sufficiently off-balance, even when delivered by a first-class ensemble.  In fact, you’ll probably be several steps ahead of the filmmakers, rather than following their misdirection.

The plot is divided into chapters named after the main players.  In the first, “Tom,” we see the titular fellow (Justice Smith), a NYC bookstore clerk, chatting up a pretty customer named Sandra (Briana Middleton), to whom he shows a first edition of her favorite novel “Jane Eyre.”  They’re soon a couple, and when Sandra tearfully explains that her brother is on the hook for big money to drug dealers, Tom offers to help.  It turns out he’s not just an impecunious clerk. 

The second chapter, “Sandra,” reveals that she’s not quite what she seems either.  Like the segments that follow, it involves a chronological hiccup, going back in time to reveal her past.  Without revealing specifics that would spoil things for anyone interested in the movie, Sandra’s story leads to that of con-man “Max” (Sebastian Stan), which in turns takes us to “Madeline” (Julianne Moore), about a sophisticated lady married to Richard Hobbes (John Lithgow), an ailing billionaire with little confidence in the business acumen of his only son.  That chapter takes us back to the present, and a conclusion that’s meant to be shockingly satisfying in its double and triple twists but is actually quite weak, depending on the stupidity of characters who are supposed to be crafty and smart. 

Worse, the filmmakers feel it necessary to follow it up with a montage explaining each convolution we’ve witnessed, as though we were too dense to have understood them in retrospect.  That sort of ending was welcome in “Suspects,” where fitting together the clues strewn throughout was genuinely challenging.  Here it’s not: if you jettisoned the entire back-and-forth device that the script employs and simply presented the narrative in strict chronological order, starting with Sandra and Max instead of Tom and proceeding from there, it would be a thoroughly pedestrian affair.

But one must allow the writers of puzzle pictures to mix up the pieces for optimal effect, and Gatewood and Tanaka do their best; it’s just that the image they eventually construct is pretty predictable.  

Still, their work has been afforded elegant treatment.  Production designer Kevin Thompson gives the locales an upscale or gritty look as called for, and cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen infuses the visuals with noirish touches of light and shade; editor Yan Miles lets each segment unfold without undue haste, and Clint Mansell’s score adds a suspenseful vibe.       

And under Benjamin Caron’s unfussy direction, all the cast make the most of their admittedly thin characters.  Smith and Middleton are a likable couple, and both display dramatic heft in the flashbacks that explore their darker motivations.  Stan brings roguish charisma to the slippery Max, and Moore a femme fatale quality to Madeline, though even an actress as good as she falters in the disappointing final stretch.  Lithgow, meanwhile, is reliably arrogant as haughty Hobbes.  The supporting cast is fine across the board.

But in the end “Sharper”—an old term for a swindler—isn’t true to its title.  It’s more blunt than cutting.

Producers: Laurie Cook, Jason Newmark, Casey Herbert, Xavier Marchand and Stuart Ford   Director: Christopher Smith   Screenplay: Christopher Smith and Laurie Cook   Cast: Jena Malone, Danny Huston, Janet Suzman, Thoren Ferguson, Steffan Cennydd, Ian Pirie, Alexandra Lewis, Jolande Obasola, Eilidh Fisher, Will Keen, Shaun Scott, Valerie Saruf and David Boyle   Distributor: IFC Midnight/Shudder

Grade: C

Atmospheric but lethargic and structurally misjudged, Christopher Smith’s religion-based horror film sets up an intriguing premise but fails to deliver on it. 

The protagonist of “Consecration” is the all-too-obviously-named Grace (Jena Malone), a petite, reserved but compassionate English ophthalmologist who receives news of the death of her brother Michael (Steffan Cennydd) in a bizarre incident at Mount Savior, a remote Catholic convent perched atop a seaside cliff on Scotland’s Isle of Skye.  A priest, he reportedly committed suicide by flinging himself off the precipice after killing another man of the cloth.

Grace, a confirmed—indeed, insistent—atheist, travels to Scotland, where DCI Harris (Thoren Ferguson), an island policeman in charge of investigating the incident, drives her to the convent.  There she’s met by the formidable Mother Superior (Janet Suzman), who presides over her large community of white-robed nuns with an imperious air while discoursing sternly on the battle between good and evil, and by Father Romero (Danny Huston), an ostentatiously considerate cleric from the Vatican, who offers both consolation and assistance.  But when she visits her brother’s corpse in a dark crypt, Grace is accosted by a vision of the dead man warning her that she’s in danger, and after awakening from a fainting spell, finds herself in one of the white robes of the nuns while her clothes are cleaned.

What quickly becomes clear, to us if not to her, is that Father Romero and Mother Superior are keeping secrets, intending to employ Grace to serve their own ends.  That includes inducing her to translate Michael’s journal, which he wrote in a code she may be able to decipher since they used it as children; though she was adopted, they’d bonded to support one another in the face of their brutal father Vincent (Ian Pirie), a religious fanatic who literally kept them locked up in cages.  Vincent also killed his wife, and is now incarcerated for the crime; when Grace visits him to tell him of his son’s death, his response is to fly into an inarticulate rage. 

It’s gradually revealed by Father Romero that the convent dates back to the twelfth century, when the site housed a crusading order called the Knights of the Morning Star, who fought demons as well as the infidel.  As Romero tells it, they kept in a special crypt a powerful relic that was lost not long ago in a natural disaster, a relic Michael was searching for.  They also practiced a unique form of confession that, if their sins were very numerous, could lead to their own death.  These revelations seem to be connected to dreams troubling Grace, in which she sees a group of the knights abduct a masked girl while she is conducting a pagan ritual in the forest.

Those aren’t the only dreams troubling Grace.  She also has frightening flashbacks to her traumatic childhood, as well as hallucinations in which she’s stalked and threatened by knife-wielding nuns.  Or are they hallucinations?

In its stately, gloomy fashion “Consecration” creates an ominous mood, and Malone cuts a sympathetic figure while Suzman, in particular among the nuns, radiates a sinister vibe and Huston adds the necessary touch of falsity to his ostensibly helpful priest.  Together Elizabeth El-Kadhi’s production design and the cinematography by Rob Hart and Shaun Mone employ looming stone walls and deep shadows to suggest being trapped in a place of cavernous dread, while Nathan Halpern’s somber score complements the visuals.

Yet Smith and co-writer Laurie Cook resort to cumbersome devices in an effort to keep viewers guessing.  They fill their screenplay with so many dreams, visions, flashbacks and flash-forwards that while the shifts keep us off balance, they grow increasingly frustrating; the very first sequence, for instance, actually destroys in one swoop any possible uncertainty about the attitude of one major character we’ve yet to meet, and when we return to it to bookend the story at the close, the way it plays out is derivative of a tactic familiar from far too many other films.  Before then the script has provided an explanation of what’s been going on (in a frantic montage of flashbacks very much at odds with the overall stately editing style of Arthur Davis and Brian Berdan), but the final revelation isn’t as surprising as Smith seems to think, particularly for one who’s patiently collected the obvious clues meted out along the way—or seen that old Twilight Zone episode, “The Howling Man.”

In sum, “Consecration” provides some low-energy shocks and moderately engaging twists, but among the host of “Omens,” “Exorcists” and similar offerings over the years, it’s a lesser contribution to the ever-expanding genre of Catholic-themed horror movies.