The Shift

 

The Shift
Starring Kristoffer Polaha, Neal McDonough, Sean Astin, Elizabeth Tabish
Directed by Brock Heasley

In the Bible there's the story of Job. He was a man who was after God's heart, and God honored him with wealth, family, friends - everything he needed. Then one day the Devil visits God and tells him that Job only prays to him because everything is going well, but if God were to take everything away from him, Job would turn his back on God. So God makes a bet with the Devil and takes everything away from Job - his money, his family, and even his health. The Devil thought Job would turn his back on God, but Job's faith was only strengthened by it, resulting in him being given everything back twofold. While the story itself has been debated as to whether or not it's real (my take is that it's an allegory or poem, as it's included in the Poetry subsection of the Bible and the original Hebrew has it in a poetic rhyme form), there's no doubt of the story's power, and asks the question to us: what would we do in such situations? "The Shift" is a contemporary version of this story and while its heart is in the right place, nothing else about this film works on any level whatsoever.

Kevin Garner (Kristoffer Polaha) is a God-fearing man who meets and falls in love with Molly (Elizabeth Tabish), and they get married and give birth to a son. Then something happens to their son that creates a rift in the marriage, and one day he gets involved in a car accident. He wakes up and meets a mysterious man who calls himself the Benefactor (Neal McDonough) who tells Kevin that he has the ability to shift people to different universes. Each choice we make in life affects our multiversal selves differently, and he wants Kevin to work for him to create the world in his image and eliminate the need for God. Kevin refuses and he's shifted to a different universe where religion is outlawed and the Benefactor is the extreme ruler, and where Molly doesn't exist. Kevin spends five years in this dystopian world and writes the Bible from memory and teaches it to his work friend Gabriel (Sean Astin) while also trying to figure out a way to shift back to his home and get back to Molly.


The Good:
The opening scene was cool.


The Bad:
I never thought Christianity would adhere to the idea of a multiverse, because in doing so would mean that there'd be countless Jesus figures and worlds where Jesus might not even exist and others where He could be completely different and all that, so a Christian film about the multiverse is silly in its own right. Obviously wanting to capitalize on the craze thanks to the MCU and especially "Everything Everywhere All at Once," "The Shift" fails to deliver any sort of magic, excitement, or anything resembling a coherent story.

This story is something that's told and retold throughout the film in an expository dumpster fire that takes up the nearly two-hour runtime. We know all about what's happening, but we just don't understand how it's happening or really why. Kevin apparently has been working with the Benefactor in every other multiverse but this one, and the Benefactor can't have that for some reason, so he shifts Kevin to another universe where he spends five years (seriously, why five years? What's he been doing that whole time? That's a long time to be in a universe you don't want to be in and not showing any sense of urgency to get back home). There's more questions than answers and nothing about the script makes sense and doesn't offer anything thought provoking or memorable.

The film is based off a twenty-minute short film that made more sense, but elongating it into an excruciating two hours is in itself a form of torture I'm sure. It drags on and on, repeats itself, tells its own story over and over, and spins its wheels worse than a seventeen year old getting a sports car from their wealthy father who's neglected him his whole life and spends his days doing donuts in the abandoned parking lot.

The effects are laughably bad, with the soldiers shooting clearly CGI bullets that make me ask the MCU for forgiveness for making fun of their bad CGI. The dystopian world is constant doom and gloom, shot in continual greyscale that makes me wonder why many cinematographers think if we actually did hit a dystopian world that everything would immediately turn to grey.

The acting is abysmal, and there's no chemistry between Kristoffer Polaha and Elizabeth Tabish that would make it believable that Kevin would pine to get home to Molly at all. Neal McDonough relishes in his evil role as the devil, but even his performance has a lot to be desired. The less said about Sean Astin the better, especially the nonsensical scene where Kevin "shifts" to another universe where there's multiple Sean Astins running around with guns. It's as silly as it sounds.


The Summary:
In trying to capitalize on the multiversal craze, "The Shift" fails to deliver anything resembling something that makes sense in this or any universe.


The Score: D-