Review: The Shift (dir. Brock Heasley, 2023)

This "faith-based" multiverse movie makes many references to the book of Job but has very little in common with it.

The Benefactor (Neal McDonough) can’t believe that Kevin (Kristoffer Polaha) is praying, in The Shift.

Is it possible to tell a Christian multiverse story?

I’ve been asking this question ever since I discovered James P. Hogan’s The Proteus Operation in the mid-1980s. It’s a time-travel story rooted in the “many worlds” theory of quantum mechanics, which posits that the universe is constantly branching into new universes: whenever things could go one way or the other, they actually go both ways, just in different realities. So when you go back in time, you don’t have to worry about “changing the future”, because you’re really just creating a new timeline with its own independent future.

As a time-travel nitpicker who’d had issues with then-recent movies like Back to the Future (if Marty McFly’s siblings vanished from the photo before he did, did that mean he had posed for the same photo without them for some reason? why was he even born if his older siblings weren’t? etc., etc.), I found the idea that time didn’t have to loop back in on itself kind of refreshing.

But I also wondered what this constantly-branching-universe idea might do to conventional ideas about sin and redemption. Was I really making good and bad choices in my life, or did I actually make every choice, just in different worlds? How many versions of me would there be at the Last Judgment? How could any of them be judged if every possible version of me was going to be there?

And that’s before we get to the Incarnation, and the question of what it would mean if the Eternal God who is beyond space and time became flesh in a multiverse where his human nature would constantly be branching off into different realities, and he himself would perhaps be making different choices in all of them.

These questions come to mind now because Angel Studios—the company behind The Chosen and Sound of Freedom—has just released The Shift, a sort of “faith-based” science-fiction movie that taps into the current appetite for multiverse stories. And I’m not sure the movie quite knows what to do with this concept.

I first wrote about The Shift when it was seeking investors two years ago (like The Chosen, it was crowd-funded), and from the beginning, it has been pitched as a sci-fi film that is loosely based on the book of Job. And it was, indeed, the biblical angle that caught my eye at first. So let’s start there.