This Lent, I took up a discipline of watching through a movie each week. That may sound more like leisure than discipline, but in my stage of life, finding time and space to watch through these films meant watching them in snippets on a tablet when I had 20-30 minutes to spare. And to choose to attend to it instead of dissociating and playing Sudoku on my phone.

The six movie I watched were:

• Badlands (1973)
• A Hidden Life (2019)
• The Last Jedi (2017)
• Of Gods and Men (2010)
• Wake up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025)
• Calvary (2014)

When I chose the movies, I did have a kind of theme n mind, but I didn’t know all that was going to come from watching them back to back.There were some very cool things that came to the surface as I watched these in succession over the course of the 6 weeks:

Together, they had a lot to say about evil. This was my first time seeing Badlands, and I was really struck by Martin Sheen’s character: the bored, self aware, charming, serial murderer. He wasn’t a maniac, he didn’t have a deep dark pit of hatred inside of him. I wouldn’t say he was quite nihilistic, but there’s a way that his demeanor matched a kind of hopelessness and apathy that is all too common 60 years after the movie was released.

Actually, evil is very rarely depicted in a white hat/black hat kind of way in these movies. It is complex, but it isn’t pathologized or excused either. There aren’t back stories given to justify evil behavior. Evil is common and pernicious and destructive. A Hidden Life shows how it can creep up gradually and make people you used to know unrecognizable. The Last Jedi (which, controversially, is one of my absolute favorite Star Wars movies) leads us along, growing in sympathy for Kylo Ren, right up until he believes himself to be better than the categories of good and evil. Calvary gives us a town that not only enjoys its vices, but snidely mocks their priest for even suggesting they might do otherwise. Evil is not theatrically “out there” in these movies. It is very present in all kinds of forms.

They also had a lot to say about what it looks like to resist evil. Many of the films push back against utilitarianism, depicting characters who continue to do good even when it doesn’t seem to make a difference. There’s Franz Jägerstätter in A Hidden Life, being explicitly reminded that his refusal to make an oath to Hitler will make no difference to anyone, and then there’s the priests in both Wake Up Dead Man and Calvary continuing to serve congregations who reject them. The last three films feature clergy insisting on serving people who reject, vilify, or threaten them. And none of the movies give a sentimental outcome for that labour of love. But they do give just enough hope that it makes the effort seem worthwhile. Or, if not worthwhile, good.

To return to Last Jedi, I actually think it has a lot to say about the appeal of a detached, “both sides” cynicism, and then reject it for something better. In fact, both of the Rian Johnson movies on my list (Last Jedi, Wake Up Dead Man) are helpful antidotes to cynicism, not because we should reject the things that lead someone to cynicism, but because in both films it is seen as the easy and selfish way out.

I’ll still be chewing on these films for the next few weeks, alone and in conversation with each other. But in a season when we contemplate what it looks like to walk in the way of the cross, these films were helpful signposts to help direct the way.