A Christian love shack
Recent years have produced many bad and/or forgettable Christian-themed films.
The Shack is, from a storytelling point of view, better than most, although believers may not find enough to engage them in what amounts to a familiar two-hour sermon, while ye of little faith (ye know who ye are) will feel harangued. Mack (Sam Worthington), is shovelling snow one day when he notices a typewritten note in his mailbox. (God types!)
The Creator, whom his wife likes to call Papa, has invited him to spend a weekend at a cabin in the woods where Mack had lost his daughter on a camping trip.
Disbelieving, he heads out to the wilderness anyway.
And whom should he meet but Papa Himself, played by Octavia Spencer and in one scene by the great First Nations actor Graham Greene. Avraham Aviv Alush plays Papa’s carpenter/rabbi son.
Sumire Matsubara is the enigmatic Sarayu (a.k.a. the Holy Spirit), who collects tears and uses them to water her garden.
There are some sweet, even funny moments in the film, adapted from the 2007 novel by William P. Young, and directed by Britain’s Stuart Hazeldine.
There is also a singular image almost worth the price of admission: Mack is standing in the midst of Sarayu’s unkempt garden, marvelling at how wild it is, when the camera swoops upward and we see a fractal pattern of whorls in the apparent chaos.
It’s a lovely, visual reminder that the big picture can elude us, particularly when we’re inside the frame. But for the most part the film fails to answer the question it lays out. And to be fair, how could it? It is one of the central mysteries to any theistic faith — how can an all-powerful deity allow evil to exist? A better non-answer can be found in the fantastic French film Of Gods and Men. But give The Shack credit for trying its best to deliver faith and hope.