There are things to like about this faith drama: it has ambition, it doesn’t always go in the direction you expect it to go, and it’s got character actor Neal McDonough playing a villain, which is a good thing. It also stands out by virtue of its rarity – I can’t remember the last time I saw a dystopian sci-fi movie based loosely on the Book of Job.
Emphasis on “loosely”, mind you. Director Brock Heasley’s version of the biblical story sees wealthy financier Kevin (Hallmark fave Kristoffer Polaha) lose everything at least twice: first when he loses his high-flying job, and then when he is separated from his wife-to-be, a woman he meets while sulking in a bar over losing his high-flying job. That separation occurs when he is whisked into a kind of parallel universe by a personable devil avatar called the Benefactor (McDonough). Kevin then spends the rest of the film hoping to get back to the correct reality. For lo, it has come to pass: Marvel do not have sole rights to annoyingly convoluted multiverse shtick.
For every bright spot in The Shift, and every moment where it has value as a cultural curio or object of camp intrigue, you unfortunately have to sit through a fair amount of blathering on about Kevin’s mission. He wants to get back to his wife, but he is also somehow a sort of hoodie-clad underground messiah figure in Louis Theroux glasses in a universe where scripture has been banned and ordinary decent ex-financiers just can’t catch a break. The film’s low ratio of fun to twaddle ultimately makes it nearly as great a trial as anything suffered by Job.
Incidentally, the company behind it all may sound familiar if you paid attention to summer 2023’s big surprise box-office success, the Trump-endorsed Mormon child-trafficking thriller Sound of Freedom, which shocked the industry by taking over $200m in the US. The same outfit is releasing this one, but seem unlikely to reap similar rewards. Then again, as Sound of Freedom proved, miracles do happen.
• The Shift is released on 15 December in UK and Irish cinemas.
