The X-Files: I Want To Believe is many things all at once (police procedural, relationship drama, political commentary, horror film, romance), consistently fascinating, if never entirely successful - a movie as Frankenstein's monster. The central story, that aspect of this long-gestating tale that co-writer/director Chris Carter, ever devious, promised would scare the pants off of us, turns out to be a big ol' MacGuffin, merely an affectionately pulpy prism (essentially The Thing With Two Heads played straight) through which to reflect and refract the relationship of former FBI Special Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson).

This is the film's elegant strength, but also, simultaneously, it's oft-cringeworthy weakness. I'm not prepared to call Carter and company homophobic, but the way he and co-writer Frank Spotnitz conspicuously place pedophilia, homosexuality, and foreigness, without comment, on the dark side of I Want To Believe's nonetheless multifaceted spectrum raises more than an eyebrow. It's quaint at best and an unchecked, hysteria-baiting offense at worst, and when contrasted with the idealized, frequently sanctified Mulder/Scully relationship it leaves a decidedly bitter aftertaste.

Think of Carter, then, as a reverse-Argento (a so-so director and a terrific writer, especially when it comes to structure) and of I Want To Believe as his Deep Red (a wintry-white Rorschach stained, occasionally, with crimson). The X-Files has always walked a fine line between the palatably corporate and the defiantly personal. This latest (and, I would hazard a guess, final) installment tends more toward the latter than to the former. It's merely functional as a thriller (it's scariest moment - a widescreen contemplation of the gulf separating J. Edgar Hoover from George W. Bush - is also its funniest), and the resonance of its numerous grace notes are often dependent on prior knowledge of events and happenings in the long-running television series that came before.

Those in the know will surely get a giddy thrill seeing Mulder and Scully navigate their respective public and private sides (stay through the end credits for a silly-grin bit of fan service), but it is actually Scully's arc that contains I Want To Believe's most salient points of interest. Now working in a Catholic hospital (a perfect choice as it allows Carter to both explicitly and subtly illustrate the push-and-pull between faith and rationality), Scully is as much the rebel of this particular bureaucracy as Mulder was at the FBI.

Moreso than the tossed-off thriller plot (which is still well-performed, under the circumstances, by Billy Connolly, Callum Keith Rennie, Amanda Peet, Alvin 'Xzibit' Joiner, et al), it's Scully's all-too-human journey through her own insecurities that raises the film's bar. Carter clearly recognizes this, granting Scully alone the final image of the film proper in which, all of an instant, she morphs from headstrong mortal into consecrated icon. The X-Files has always traded in frequently slick and sledgehammered Catholic imagery, but here the beatific gesture - purely cinematic in each and every particular - feels just right.

Written by Keith Uhlich