As if unearthed from a forgotten corner of an archive vault, the opening shots of Simon Magus flicker like a spliced-up German expressionist film, revealing a nightmarish world of crooked trees, boarded-up cottages, and murky, Gothic landscapes. In writer-director Ben Hopkins' storybook fable, a backwoods 19th-century Polish village seems so close to hell that the devil himself makes appearances and the townsfolk buttress their religious convictions with black magic and superstition. But once the story takes shape and the leaden dialogue begins to drop, Simon Magus seems all the more suited to the silent era, which would have welcomed its oversimplified conflicts and bold demarcations of good and evil. With little ambiguity or nuance, Hopkins pits the struggling Jewish community against mercenary Christians over a stretch of land where a railroad station can be erected to save the village's floundering commerce. (It's unclear what they would export, other than misery.) The land is owned by eccentric squire and learned poet Rutger Hauer, who considers two competing bids. The lower bid is from Stewart Townsend, an idealistic Jew who wants to protect the future of his people and win the heart of lovelorn widow Embeth Davidtz; the higher is from Sean McGinley, a Christian entrepreneur who ruthlessly schemes for the prize. To that end, McGinley enlists the title character, a cursed outcast from the synagogue who occasionally converses with the devil (Ian Holm), to infiltrate the Jewish sect and spy on his counterpart. As played by Noah Taylor (Flirting, Shine), this tortured vagabond is by far the film's most compelling creature, because his vacillation between the two sides is not just tactical maneuvering, but a wrenching spiritual battle over his soul. The other characters are too clearly marked for salvation or damnation, which may be a function of the story's fable-like moral certainty, but makes for uninspired viewing regardless. Simon Magus succeeds at creating a shadowy netherworld straight from the pages of a Grimm fairytale, but leaves it disappointingly underpopulated.