The film is based on Beware the Night, a book co-written by Ralph Sarchie, a former New York City police sergeant and self-described demonologist — although even Sarchie acknowledges that Deliver Us From Evil takes several liberties with his first-person experiences with the paranormal. Eric Bana plays the gruff Sarchie, who has a strange sixth sense for sniffing out violent crimes as they’re happening. That talent becomes a liability, though, once he begins investigating a series of random occurrences that may be connected, including a deranged woman (Olivia Horton) who tries to kill her child at the zoo and an ex-soldier (Sean Harris, Prometheus) who murders his partner in a house-painting business.

As the title suggests, however, Deliver Us From Evil has more on its mind than creepy behavior. Sarchie is a lapsed Catholic, which means that, just like every other movie character who once was religious but has since renounced God, he will have to confront his loss of faith in the most on-the-nose way possible. To expedite this personal transformation, the film has helpfully supplied Sarchie with an opposing force in the form of Joe Mendoza (Edgar Ramírez), a recovering heroin addict who found Jesus, got clean, and is now a priest specializing in the demonically possessed. Despite Sarchie’s protestations, Mendoza is convinced that these crimes are the work of an evil spirit, a theory that becomes more plausible once the policeman starts being plagued by upsetting, gruesome visions of ghouls.

Beyond its perfectly calibrated tone of slow, steady dread, Sinister was superb because, at heart, it was a smart character study about how one arrogant writer (Ethan Hawke) destroys himself and his family through his own hubris. The horror wasn’t just frightening but also emotional and grimly poetic, the cathartic shocks tied to Hawke’s chronic failings and gradual comeuppance. Deliver Us From Evil, which like Sinister was co-written by Derrickson, aims for the same sort of human-scale drama, observing as two very different men work together both to solve a mystery and to grapple with fundamental questions about faith and evil. This movie has plenty of routine scares — cats and dogs are always conveniently hiding in dark corners to jump out at inopportune moments — but they’re buttressed by somber discussions about whether there’s a God and, if there is, why so much wickedness happens in the world.

This sort of glum-faced pondering could be tedious if it wasn’t for the quality of Derrickson’s cast. The older Bana gets, the more his rugged good looks age into a weary, weathered resignation that adds extra soulfulness to his dark eyes. His Bronx accent wavers, but he has no problem conveying Sarchie’s haunted spirit. In the far more thankless role of The Concerned But Frustrated Wife, Olivia Munn does a good job of Being Supportive of her overworked husband, and then Being Terrified when this mysterious evil visits their home. But Sarchie’s true soul mate is Mendoza, and Ramírez ennobles what could be a painfully clichéd part. Playing a wild-man priest opens the door for all types of scene-chewing, but Ramírez is admirably restrained, actually going through the trouble of investing Mendoza with real pathos and externalizing his inner struggle. The film’s finale calls for one of those blowout exorcism scenes that have become popular again in horror, but Ramírez lends the sequence gravitas, responding to the moment with a performance that’s gargantuan without being campy.

But with that said, Deliver Us From Evil’s stab at depth only goes so far. Bana has always had a striking physicality on screen, but his reserved style can render his characters inert rather than anguished. That’s a huge problem for a film that wants Sarchie’s tough-guy terseness to suggest oceans of torment underneath. And with movies about demonic possession, there are only so many paths for the story to follow — and unfortunately, Deliver Us From Evil does tread familiar terrain. (What’s worse, Derrickson apparently didn’t get the memo that putting kids in danger or utilizing childhood nursery rhymes to create shivers is really tacky if it’s done perfunctorily.)

What Deliver Us From Evil does have going for it is a sophisticated, gorgeous vision of a world draped in darkness and depravity. Cinematographer Scott Kevan and production designer Bob Shaw imaginatively turn routine horror movie locations — psychiatric wards, old basements — into evocative cathedrals of shadows. Derrickson has always been better at creating mood than in terrifying audiences, and Deliver Us From Evil has plenty of niggling unease. Even when we aren’t enraptured by what’s happening, there are some pleasures to be had from immersing in the film’s slithering anxiety. But it never scares up much originality.

Deliver Us From Evil is now playing. All images courtesy of Screen Gems.

Set in the near future when an invading alien race has wiped out much of humanity over a five-year period, Edge of Tomorrow stars Cruise as William Cage, a US officer who’s essentially a high-ranking military spokesman. (Squeamish around blood and having never set foot on the battlefield, Cage ran an advertising firm before the war. He’s the type of slimy, smug salesman that Cruise’s Jerry Maguire character was trying to avoid becoming.) But after Cage pisses off a superior (Brendan Gleeson), he finds himself stripped of his rank and stationed on the front line for an attack that is humanity’s last, best chance to subdue this alien race, known as the Mimics. Strapped into a mechanized super-suit like his fellow infantry soldiers, Cage realizes he’s dead meat; he doesn’t even know how to activate his suit’s weapons.

But a funny thing happens on the way to Cage’s funeral. Seconds after dying in combat, he wakes up to discover that he’s back at the beginning of the previous day. No matter what Cage does, his death returns him to that same point, forcing him to relive the same period of time again and again. Unsure what’s going on and unable to convince anybody of what he’s experiencing, Cage finally finds an ally in a decorated soldier, Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), who once had the same inexplicable power that he has. Together, they have to figure out the right combination of moves that will keep Cage alive long enough to kill the Mimics’ queen, the Omega.

The Groundhog Day comparisons are unavoidable, but unlike that Bill Murray comedy Edge of Tomorrow isn’t about its main character learning to become a better person but, rather, learning how not to die. The movie is based on Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s sci-fi novel All You Need Is Kill, which was praised for a clever time-looping conceit that doubled as an apt metaphor for the monotony and pointlessness of war. Edge of Tomorrow has similar thematic undercurrents if you want to note them. (For instance, the chorus of Cage’s run-ins with a comic-blowhard commanding officer, played by Bill Paxton, slowly reveals itself to be a parody of every gung-ho war movie ever made.) But the film is more of a typical Cruise vehicle in that it focuses primarily on crafty, muscular sequences that are accented by the actor’s emotional intensity, lending the action an empathetic, human dimension.

Credited to three screenwriters, including The Usual Suspects Oscar-winner Christopher McQuarrie, Edge of Tomorrow gets a surprising amount of mileage out of its central premise. Even if you haven’t experienced this loop-de-loop conceit before, there’s a worry that the film’s repetition of events will become, well, repetitive. So tip your cap to director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Mr & Mrs. Smith) and editor James Herbert for figuring out how to balance Cage’s growing frustration with moments of hopefulness as the character gradually makes progress toward finding the Omega. Some might complain that the film’s do-over premise is another example of Hollywood blockbusters cheapening the trauma and finality of death, but Edge of Tomorrow actually suggests a fate worse than dying: an unending purgatory in which unlimited second chances equate to infinite amounts of failure.

That existential notion girds the film’s teasing, puzzle-solving story, giving it a resonance to go along with Cage’s trial-and-error process. Liman choreographs the action sequences with a frenetic grandeur — Edge of Tomorrow’s battle scenes are like a sci-fi Saving Private Ryan — and his aliens are wonderfully terrifying monster-spiders, the best of their kind since Starship Troopers. Edge of Tomorrow gives Liman his biggest canvas, but his cold smarts and sneaky sense of humor aren’t lost in the process. No matter how convoluted some of the logic gets, the film always feels visually and narratively sophisticated where other summer tentpoles are merely lumbering and bludgeoning.

For a change, though, Cruise isn’t the all-confident hero: Cage is a coward and certainly too old to be a fighting soldier. But Cruise wears his limitations lightly. For the actor, human weaknesses like age or squeamishness are mere trifles to overcome, and his commitment to Cage’s buried decency gives the performance a rugged dignity. And Cruise has learned not to be a star who has to dominate his movies: Blunt’s hard-as-nails character gets all the best one-liners, while he uses his familiar, slightly hammy bug-eyed intensity to wring laughs from his character’s impossible situation. There’s been talk that Edge of Tomorrow could be one of the summer’s bigger bombs, and the tracking hasn’t been very promising so far. It would be ironic that after years of being one of the world’s biggest stars, Cruise could be entering a period where his work actually gets overlooked. If so, Edge of Tomorrow will be Exhibit A in the case for why he’s still killing it.

Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow is now playing internationally. It opens in the US on June 6th. All images courtesy of Warner Bros.