I think I was so firmly not its target audience, the last third of the film increasingly did not compute for me. I had no trouble with the supernatural aspects. After the bomb goes off, when a bruised and bewildered Bendrix stumbles upstairs to find Sarah on her knees in a state of shock at seeing him alive, it was immediately clear to me that he had been dead, that Sarah's prayer had brought him back, and that she was likely to pay for his life with hers, that being one of the oldest forms of exchange.1 I didn't even have a problem with the idea of keeping promises to someone you don't believe in, not because of Pascal's wager, but because suddenly it turns out to be important to you. I have great trouble with the concept of a God that would use a destructive relationship as the mechanism to bring back to faith a woman who never before needed any kind of god in her life merely because as a small child she was baptized Catholic to spite her non-religious father. And Bendrix is destructive; I have to assume that Van Johnson did a good job with the character because he set off so many of my interpersonal alarms with his possessiveness, his jealousy, his double standards, and his absolute refusal to treat her as a human being with independent thoughts and wishes, not just some object of obsessive desire. She ends their relationship, he stalks her as soon as he gets the chance. She tells him to leave her alone, he harries her out of her house. When a feverish, weeping woman tells you she hasn't got the strength to run away from you, that doesn't mean she can no longer resist her own long-repressed passions, that is right there the reason for the concept of enthusiastic consent. And that Sarah dies to get away from him—from the untenable Hobson's choice he has forced her life into, twisting her arm to get her away from the husband she doesn't love but has promised not to leave—but thereby finds God is a happy ending? If the film was intended as a horror story, maybe. But we are meant to see Sarah's late-found faith as the one true thing in her life, the thing that saves her. Thank you, I am formally creeped out now.
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I think I was so firmly not its target audience, the last third of the film increasingly did not compute for me. I had no trouble with the supernatural aspects. After the bomb goes off, when a bruised and bewildered Bendrix stumbles upstairs to find Sarah on her knees in a state of shock at seeing him alive, it was immediately clear to me that he had been dead, that Sarah's prayer had brought him back, and that she was likely to pay for his life with hers, that being one of the oldest forms of exchange.1 I didn't even have a problem with the idea of keeping promises to someone you don't believe in, not because of Pascal's wager, but because suddenly it turns out to be important to you. I have great trouble with the concept of a God that would use a destructive relationship as the mechanism to bring back to faith a woman who never before needed any kind of god in her life merely because as a small child she was baptized Catholic to spite her non-religious father. And Bendrix is destructive; I have to assume that Van Johnson did a good job with the character because he set off so many of my interpersonal alarms with his possessiveness, his jealousy, his double standards, and his absolute refusal to treat her as a human being with independent thoughts and wishes, not just some object of obsessive desire. She ends their relationship, he stalks her as soon as he gets the chance. She tells him to leave her alone, he harries her out of her house. When a feverish, weeping woman tells you she hasn't got the strength to run away from you, that doesn't mean she can no longer resist her own long-repressed passions, that is right there the reason for the concept of enthusiastic consent. And that Sarah dies to get away from him—from the untenable Hobson's choice he has forced her life into, twisting her arm to get her away from the husband she doesn't love but has promised not to leave—but thereby finds God is a happy ending? If the film was intended as a horror story, maybe. But we are meant to see Sarah's late-found faith as the one true thing in her life, the thing that saves her. Thank you, I am formally creeped out now.