Rick’s Reel Recommendations | 3 Spiritual Films

COLUMN | WAIRUATANGA / SPIRITUALITY

Written by Ricky Lai (he/him) | @rickthelai on IG & Letterboxd | Film Columnist

1.  A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, 1956)

The goal is to escape. It’s the only goal. Hours, days, and months pass while Fontaine, a captured French Resistance fighter, chips away at the door of his prison cell. Sweeping away the wood shavings on the floor, he plies the frame of his bed for a wire with which to weave a rope. Bresson is famously a director who leaves sentimentalism at the door, much like the way Fontaine ditches his shoes on the rooftop. With his approach to action being so careful and cerebral, I cannot overstate how long I spent on the edge of my seat watching this. Despite its coldness I was deeply moved by this prisoner’s devotion to his goal. I recognised a religiosity in Fontaine’s slow but single-minded pursuit of life, with the leaps of faith growing vaster as he shares communion with a younger cellmate and becomes attuned with the sounds thrumming from his surroundings. You’re there, listening closely with him; the creaking of the door frame, the tearing of fabric, and the squeak of a bicycle as it circles the moat. ‘With both hands, I restrained the beating of my heart.’

2.  The Company of Strangers (Cynthia Scott, 1990)

After the 27-year-old Michelle’s tour bus breaks down in the Quebecois countryside, it’s not long before she goes out to survey the damage – and sprains her ankle too. The passengers on the bus, seven elderly women, accompany her to safety at a nearby cottage as they wait for rescue. Yet what wonderful company this troupe turn out to be, and how gradually this hinterland becomes Edenic as their friendship gently blooms. This is a largely improvised film in which women with decades of accrued wisdom sit in overgrown meadows and exchange open-hearted stories of their lives. Whether fond, sad, or both at once. They watch birds, they sleep on hay; they catch and cook frogs, they talk about death; they sing songs they remember well and dance like there’s a radio in the room. It’s like a meet-cute between Fellini’s ‘Amarcord’ and a Fannie Flagg novel, and I’d call it cosy if it didn’t make my eyes well up so often. In my favourite scene, Michelle (the young bus driver) reassures Beth, a lady 53 years her senior, that she doesn’t need a wig to hide her thinning hair. “I may surprise you any minute, though.’ ‘Shock me.” Then, during a remarkably tender confession from Beth about the heaviest grief in her lifetime, we witness a vast difference in optimism between generations. Although this is crucially a film about women listening to and raising one another, I staunchly believe watching it can strengthen the empathy of so many young men. Indeed, these people are in the middle of nowhere, but it’s a wonderful nowhere to be.

3.  It Ends (Alexander Ullom, 2025)

As a ‘Twilight Zone’ fan, I knew I’d like this, but I didn’t expect how much I’d feel it. It’s a simple horror premise: on a night ride, four college-age friends accidentally turn onto a never-ending road. They can’t call or message anybody. For a rather terrifying reason, they can’t leave the car and wander out into the woods either. The only option is to drive, and the crushing sound of tyres against tarmac becomes synonymous with the odometer’s steady climb towards infinity. Empty cars on the roadside imply the tale of other drivers once upon a time, doomed to the same thoroughfare and having given up. Ullom’s less-is-more approach makes ‘It Ends’ a remarkably minimal film. Much like any road trip, you’re left with plenty of time to think to yourself: what does it all mean? Catching my reflection in a cast and crew my own age, I couldn’t help but see this film as a dirge for my fellow Gen Z and our passage into adulthood. Anxiously perceiving a world of hell that we’ve inherited as a vicious blur hemmed in by the void. When one character encounters a bout of rain, their response is a sigh of relief: ‘This is good. This is new.’ But it’s not new – it has rained on Earth for millions of years, and hasn’t meant anything since. And yet I am moved by this character’s frayed hope that, in Old Testament fashion, the rain could mean something the next time it falls. To quote a once-in-a-lifetime sage: ‘Letting the days go by / Same as it ever was / Same as it ever was’.