Variety
A Hallmark-card therapy session, a kind of woodland weekend-retreat self-actualisation seminar hosted by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
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The Shack
A grieving man receives a personal invitation to meet God in this drama based on William P. Young's best-selling novel. Stars Avatar's Sam Worthington and Oscar-winner Octavia Spencer.
After suffering a family tragedy, Mack Phillips (Worthington) spirals into a deep depression. Facing a crisis of faith, he receives a mysterious letter urging him to an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Despite his doubts, Mack journeys to the shack and encounters an enigmatic trio of strangers led by a woman named Papa (Spencer). Through this meeting, Mack finds important truths that will transform his understanding of his tragedy and change his life forever.
2016Rating: M, Mature themes132 minsUSA
Drama
The Shack / Reviews
Time Out
For a faith-based film that aims to promote spiritual healing and prescribe forgiveness, The Shack is almost unforgivably joyless and visually bland.
Full reviewThe New York Times
As the film passes the two-hour mark, it begins to feel as if it's treading water. People of faith already know that there are no cut-and-dried answers to the kinds of questions Mack is asking.
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Los Angeles Times
Even its jolts of surrealism feel curiously stilted; what it needed was a director whose reverence would be tempered by a healthy sense of the ludicrous, an ability to tap into and draw out the material's stranger undercurrents.
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Hollywood Reporter
However universal the perennial questions and struggles that The Shack illuminates, under Stuart Hazeldine's plodding direction, its faith-based brand of self-help feels like being trapped in someone else's spiritual retreat - in real time.
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