Los Angeles. Telephonist Sharon relieves the tedium of the everyday by cruising the airport and bars for sexual partners. Increasingly disillusioned with her life, however, and susceptible to the blandishments of fundamentalist religion around her, she renounces her past for Jesus Christ. Duchovny tells her that instead of drugs she's "doing God". Six years later they are married and have a young daughter when he is killed by a spree-killer and Sharon is convinced God has told her The Rapture is imminent and that she should retire to the desert with her daughter to await the end of the world.

Writer-director Tolkin's film arrived in the slipstream of Robert Altman's spectacular comeback, The Player, which he scripted from his own novel. Altman's success, however, did little for the writer's own behind-the-camera debut. The Rapture is a much darker, largely humourless piece of millennial dread. Reactions varied wildly from blasphemy to evil religious propaganda in its literal reading of fundamentalist belief that come the hour, those saved will be bodily lifted from the earth. The climax belongs to the thundering hoofs of the Four Horsemen, flaming swords and ascending spirits, but the script leaves it open to interpretation: is this verbatim truth, Rogers' vision, or just some terrible nightmare? It poses difficult questions for all shades of belief, even a supposedly merciful deity. "The Rapture says that God is fucked," was Tolkin's take.

Whatever the truth, the film is littered with a palpable sense of anxiety. Sharon's casual pick-ups are grim, soulless affairs. Equally, the crusaders - pushers - she encounters with their tales of The Pearl and The Boy hide behind scary tracts and even scarier smiles. The community into which she and Duchovny take their daughter is airless, stifling in its empty-headed belief. Worse, Rogers countenances her husband's death because he is now in Heaven; their daughter is, if anything, even more deferential. For much of the film's latter half she demands to know of her mother why they have to wait for God, why they cannot simply die and join Duchovny. It's harrowing stuff.

The culmination of all this angst comes sometime before the end and is as bleak and uncompromising as contemporary cinema gets. Even the final opening of the Book of Revelation (literal, sparsely realised) is strangely anticlimactic.

The film is not without flaws. The lack of humour lays necessarily heavy, and Will Patton's cop is lack-lustre and largely irrelevant, especially pitched against Rogers' emphatic playing. But elsewhere Duchovny, on this evidence, used to be able to act, and Patrick Bauchau's throaty, super-sleaze swinger is a delight. Thomas Newman's rumbling, ambient score is admirably unsettling.

The Rapture is a one-off, an audacious calling card that Tolkin found tough to follow. His plane-crash novel Among The Dead passed unnoticed and a second feature - the intermittently smart, frequently humdrum comedy The New Age - went straight to video hell. It seems inconceivable that the arrival of his first film on tape will do much to rectify events - it's too slow, too ambiguous for a mass audience - but remains one of the most imaginative and shocking horror movies of the last decade.

(NB: The soundtrack on the copy of the Encore cassette reviewed is occasionally out of synch with the pictures. Whether or not this affects all copies is unknown.)