onebug

Going into this, I was kind of turned off by the intense Protestantism of it all. But you know, by the end, I was kinda vibing with it. Despite its omnipresent Christian iconography, this film is really interested in the three-way tension between religion-as-organization, religion-as-tradition, and religion-as-action. This is something that anyone who's at all religiously inclined has to wrestle with, and in some ways a more pressing question for religions with strong assimilationist currents.

Nor is even the text solely interested in this from a Christian perspective—the film centers around a suicide vest, to an American viewer the emblem of militant Islam, and its project is in large part building an understanding for a hypothetical progressive Christian viewer of how *their* beliefs could push someone to don such a weapon. It's a story of radicalization, but not (as one might expect from an American film) one that's finger-wagging or even intrinsically tragic. It's more complex than that, a picture of all the pain and struggle of someone who's trying to figure out what to do and how to feel in an impossible world.