THE SHIFT (2023) - Mark Reviews Movies

The Shift, Angel Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 30, 2023

The notion of a multiverse has become so prevalent in popular culture that it now makes its way into the realm of faith-based movies. Hence, we have the premise of The Shift, which awkwardly adapts the Biblical story of Job by way of clunky world-hopping mechanics and a lot of preaching.

Such movies often overlook or ignore the fundamentals of storytelling in order to insert a religious message as frequently as possible, but writer/director Brock Heasley's movie might have benefited more from straightforward religiosity. That, at least, could have made more sense on a story level than whatever nonsense is on display here.

Instead, we get a bunch of half-baked ideas about multiple universes, mystical entities that are capable of swapping people between those universes, and a villain who isn't officially Satan, because he goes by a different name, but most definitely is meant to be that fallen angel, the source of all evil in the world. Well, he's the source of all evil in all of the worlds of all of the various dimensions in this story, and it feels a bit quaint to consider everything in such black-and-white terms when there are apparently countless possibilities for everything and everyone in the movie's design of a multiverse.

The whole conceit basically leaves us wondering what's so important or even interesting about the story's protagonist. He's a former hedge fund employee named Kevin Garner (Kristoffer Polaha), who's laid off after a major economic downturn—presumably the 2008 financial crisis, although even the movie's initial timeline is unclear.

About to drown his sorrows at a hotel bar, Kevin meets-cute with Molly (Elizabeth Tabish), who approaches and flirts with him on a dare from her friends. While their conversation—the only one of substance they have until the third act—doesn't exactly make their bond worth investing an entire narrative into, Heasley does a somewhat neat trick with dialogue and editing to show the course of their relationship, by way of hypotheticals that actually happen. The most important piece of information is that Molly regularly goes to church, so if Kevin wants to date and marry and start a family with her, he'd better get on board with that, too.

Despite not getting to know her at all, Molly must be some kind of woman, because the man of lapsed faith apparently becomes the most religious man in all of history and the entirety of the multiverse. Why else would the Benefactor (Neal McDonough) target him specifically, and why would his prayerful defiance of this supernatural entity, who still needs a world-hopping gizmo in order to do his foul deeds, cause such a massive shift in the dynamics of this alternate reality?

To explain it would take too much time, while probably not being able to explain something that simultaneously is so convoluted and so underdeveloped. Essentially, the Benefactor is the supreme leader of this alternate world, rising after a lot of war and a period of global peace. When Kevin defies him by praying, the Benefactor disappears, leaving Kevin alone, in hiding, and without his wife (who doesn't exist in this universe, for reasons that are hand-waved away) for five, unseen years. He has spent that time looking for a world-hopping wristband, held only by angel-like entities called Shifters, in order to find the Molly he knew, while also trying to copy the Bible from memory.

That seems to be the foundation of the plot, at least, because Heasley's movie is more about its parable aspects—ideas of choice and selfishness and a totalitarian state that has outlawed any kind of religion (although the movie only cares about Christianity in that regard)—than in attempting to make much of any sense about what's happening, let alone how and why it is. There's a clever idea or two tossed into the mix, such as a device that allows a people to see what their extra-dimensional doppelgangers are doing. For the most part, though, Heasley provides the suggestion of multiversal intrigue, as well as of tyrannical and supernatural threats, so that Kevin can be the vague, faithful victim, holding on to his religious beliefs no matter what befalls him.

By the time the story reaches the climactic showdown, even the message becomes muddled. Part of that is the broadly imagined and developed characters, who are meant to be universal stand-ins but are just bland and inoffensively flawed, but most of it comes down to the conflicting goals of The Benefactor. It wants to have thoughtful science-fiction and thoughtful spiritualism, but there's little evidence on display that much thought has been put into either of those concepts.

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