“I love science fiction and my faith is very important to me. And those two don’t usually intersect,” writer and film director Brock Heasley told The Stream recently. Maybe that’s why Angel Studios’ latest film, The Shift, doesn’t feel like the usual faith-based film. The Shift, a full-length feature film, explores the Christian faith through a sci-fi format. There’s light and dark, good and evil. It is layered and, at times, complicated, but it can never be called cheesy or trite. 

The Shift tells the story of Kevin Garner (Kristoffer Polaha), a man who has been “shifted” to another dimension, away from his beloved wife (Elizabeth Tabish). The movie follows Garner’s struggle to fight evil and do good as well as his journey to get back to his wife. There are no “right” answers for the protagonist. And everything has a consequence. In addition to Tabish (The Chosen), The Shift stars Neal McDonough (Yellowstone, Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist) and Sean Astin (The Lord of the Rings).

Heasley made the film for himself, he said, so it’s difficult for him to define an audience for it. “In my mind, the audience was always just me. … I wanted to make a film that I wanted to see and that I haven’t seen.”

From the feedback he’s had so far, women love the film even more than men. Perhaps that is because there is a romantic piece in the movie. “Women, as it turns out, are the biggest fans of this movie by far. Guys have a slightly harder time with it, which is just fascinating to me because I never thought of this as something that would appeal necessarily to women. I thought they would be the hardest group for us to capture with this film. But there is a strong romance component to this film,” Heasley said.

“I think we’re honest in the sense of, you know, yeah, it is a sci-fi film, but it’s not so heady and cerebral that it doesn’t have an emotional punch to it. That’s because I think the film, if it’s anything, it’s an allegory for our life, for the life that we all lead.”

Audiences are starved for something original. “We’re a little tired of franchises, we’re a little tired of sequels, we’re a little tired of the same thing, but different. We want actual different. The success of Barbie, the success of Sound of Freedom, the success of a few films this year that have really — Oppenheimer — that have really taken a step outside of the box, [they] have been richly rewarded. And I think that if audiences are looking for that experience, I think we have that for them.”

For more information and purchasing tickets, visit Angel.com/tickets.

Watch the trailer:

Nancy Flory, Ph.D., is a senior editor at The Stream. You can follow her @NancyFlory3, and follow The Stream @Streamdotorg.