One movie review I wrote earlier was on 13 Assassins. I’ve watched quite a few more movies since, and thought perhaps I should write about them more often, the things that stay with me after watching them.

Here are three very different ones.

1. True Grit

True Grit follows 14 year old Mattie Ross, whose father has been murdered. Determined to bring his killer to justice, she hires the rather rough and drunk U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn to track him down, and insists on going with him.

There are plenty of gruesome scenes of shooting, stabbing and dead bodies. Yet running underneath the movie is this lovely old Christian hymn, one of my favorites 🎶:

Nothing free except grace

As Mattie recounts how her father was murdered and his killer fled, she says:

You must pay for everything in this world, one way or another. There is nothing free, except the grace of God.

Right. We spend our lives paying for things indeed. Money, choices, mistakes, commitments, consequences. That’s perhaps also why we so naturally live with the concept of earning things. We gotta work for it. You gotta earn it, show me you deserve it. Many things that are worth having cost us something.

And then there is grace.. Free to us, but certainly not free. Someone paid for that too.

Time gets away from us

Years later at the very end of the movie, Mattie is now an older woman. Rooster is gone, and by the time she finally tracked him down, he already died. In the ending scene, she says:

Time just gets away from us.

It does, doesn’t it? It amazes me how we live thinking we have plenty of time.

One minute something feels like the biggest thing in your life, and then somehow forty years have passed. People grow old. People disappear. Things you thought would remain don’t. And time just gets away from us.

That’s partly why God’s grace is so precious. Everything else is slipping through our hands. Things you work hard for gives way in time, God’s free grace remains forever.

2. 25 Years of Innocence

This Polish movie is based on the true story of Tomasz Komenda, who was wrongly convicted of the rape and murder of a teenage girl and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Eighteen years

He spent 18 years there before the case was reopened that eventually led to his exoneration.

The movie follows the interrogations, the conviction, the horrific treatment in prison, and also his mother, who continued believing in his innocence and fighting for him. It is not an easy movie to watch.

Afterwards I looked up what happened to the real Tomasz Komenda. He was finally acquitted and released, received compensation for those years unjustly taken from him, and then soon developed cancer. And he died a few years later in 2024.

That’s so sad 😟. I was thinking: Seriously?

18 years of his life gone for something he did not do. Arrested at 23, and by the time he got out he was already 41. Think about the time lost. Then died at age of 46 from battling with cancer. The things he suffered inside prison are difficult enough to imagine. Then you think about his mother, watching what happened to her son and being unable to get him out.

Too much to carry

There are so many burdens in this world that, if you knew all of them, none of us could carry them.

That’s one strange thing of living in the info age we are in. Once upon a time you knew the suffering immediately around you. Now in one click we know about wars, murders, abuse, disasters, injustice and tragedies happening at every corner of the world. Most of the things that have nothing to do with us in a sense, and which we could do nothing about either.

And well, we weren’t meant to carry all of that actually. It doesn’t mean we are indifferent in that we don’t care or grieve. We should certainly help where we can. But the weight of the world was never meant to be put on our shoulders, nor do we have the capacity for it.

It’s put on Someone’s shoulder instead. That’s a glimpse of what God bears with. We can’t stomach what we do see, yet we don’t see all. He sees all, and that stretching through all of time, not just in our generation. That’s what Christ bore at the cross, all that is wrong with the world, and the deepest burden we could never bear ourselves—the guilt and judgment of our sin.

If watching an innocent man being condemned and suffer terribly for a crime he did not commit churns something inside us, well, then think and look at Jesus on the cross.

Not merely wrongly accused of one particular crime, but the only truly innocent man who ever lived. He’s condemned, humiliated, beaten and crucified.

Tomasz Komenda desperately wanted to be declared innocent and set free (as he should be), Jesus went willingly. Not because justice did not matter, but precisely because it did. Someone had to pay. And you and I can’t pay it. Otherwise, who would bear our sins..?

That is what our salvation cost. The free grace we receive is very costly.

3. The Father

Anthony Hopkins plays an ageing man with dementia, while his daughter Anne is trying to care for him as his grasp on reality increasingly falls apart.

The movie is told in such a way that you experience some of his confusion with him. People seem to change. Rooms change. Events repeat differently. And you start wondering yourself what actually happened.

It is heartbreaking. There is the frailty of the father, slowly losing himself. But there is also the weight carried by the daughter. Her father needs her, but caring for him is consuming her life.

When the mind gives way

We like being independent and useful. We like knowing where we are, what we’re doing, and who people are. And then one day perhaps we don’t. Isn’t that frightening?

There is something particularly frightening about losing your mind because it is the very instrument you use to make sense of everything else. If your body fails, your mind can still tell you what is happening. But what happens when the mind itself gives way..?

He’s still got his watch ⌚

Throughout the movie Anthony is rather possessive about his watch. He keeps checking for it. People must not take it. Near the end, when almost everything else has become uncertain, he still knows one thing: his watch is on his wrist. That’s what gives him a sense of stability and sanity.

I found that deeply sad.

What’s yours when everything starts falling away? Your home? Your possessions? Your memories, independence, or your own mind?

We spend decades accumulating things we can point to and say, this is mine. My house. My work. My family. My memories. My life. And then even the ground inside your own head can give way. Why are you so sure you’re standing on solid ground?

We’re all frightened children inside

Near the end Anthony becomes completely disoriented. The old man who has spent much of the movie stubborn, difficult, proud and determined to remain independent suddenly asks for his mother. Underneath the old man, the decades of adulthood, the intelligence, the personality, the accumulated experience of an entire lifetime, there was suddenly just a frightened little boy wanting his mother.

In the final scene when he was finally moved to an aged care, he asked the nurse, ‘Will she come and see me?.. I want my Mommy, I want my Mommy.. I want to go home..’ And he started sobbing.

And I realised that’s all of us. We are fragile and there is a scared child somewhere inside us. We grow up. We learn things. We become capable and independent. We accumulate decades of experience and convince ourselves we have a reasonable handle on life. But you strip enough away and we are very small creatures after all.

When you can no longer hold on

What do you hold onto when even your ability to hold onto things disappears?

For Christians, while our minds are still clear, we fill them with truth. Scripture, hymns, words that have accompanied God’s people through suffering and death for generations. Sometimes things deeply embedded in us remain when much else has disappeared, and there is good reason to fill our minds now with what is true, good and beautiful.

But even that’s not going to be sufficient. Because perhaps one day I will not remember the verses or the hymns. May be I won’t even remember much of who I am.

The greater comfort is therefore not ultimately that I will always be able to hold onto Christ. It is that Christ holds onto me. My mind may fail. My memory may fail. My body certainly will. But He will not.

When everything you call yours can eventually be taken away—even your ability to know what is yours—you had better have something, or Someone, who does not depend upon your ability to keep hold of Him.

Yes, the greater comfort is not that I will always be able to hold onto Christ, it is that Christ holds onto me.