Review

Culture

Film & TV

24 March 2023

9 min read

Family dramas

It’s family ties that bind together a superhero story, a horror tale and a rom-com. Yaroslav Walker’s review sheds light on what these ties unexpectedly reflect, as he reviews Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania, Knock at the Cabin, and What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

Father and daughter super heroes stand and look to the left.

Kathryn Newton and Paul Rudd play Cassie Lang and her father Scott Lang - Ant-Man.

Marvel Studios

Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania is the latest release from the Marvel Empire (in whose shadow we all live). The Empire is very much faltering. The main (sensible) criticisms levelled at the Marvel franchise are formulaic films and over-complicated stories that require you to not only have watched all the relevant films in the series, but also now the various TV series pumped out by Disney Plus. Ant-Man doesn’t fix them.

The plot sees Scott Lang enjoying a happy life: adored by a grateful public and with lots of time to spend with his partner Hope and his daughter Cassie. However, Cassie has grown up since ‘the snap’ and is now protesting injustice and getting arrested. Scott wonders how he can best re-connect with Cassie and make up for the five years he lost. This bonding is interrupted when all the heroes are sucked into the Quantum Realm by Kang who wishes to use the Ant-Man powers to retrieve a thing to escape the thing to do a bad thing… no sorry, it’s just ridiculous, I have no idea what is going on!

I’m a nerd and a fan, but even I sat there and got depressed at how incomprehensible and inconsequential it all felt. A simple ‘hero must retrieve object to save loved-ones’ plot groans under the sheer amount of exposition and world-building and forced emotional plotting. The first fifteen minutes are a passable family drama, and then everything is just CGI and battles and quips – SO MANY QUIPS!

Nothing is able to sit as a dramatic moment: immediately a joke, or a quip, or a gag has to be rammed down our throats.

The CGI is fine, but so great a surfeit gives the drama a weightlessness, making it impossible to invest in. The script…well…looking up Jeff Loveness’ previous writing credits was illuminating. He has written for pop-culture virus Rick & Morty and that influence is everywhere. Nothing is able to sit as a dramatic moment: immediately a joke, or a quip, or a gag has to be rammed down our throats, meaning weightless CGI is only compounded by a script that revels is cynicism rather than in character. This is the bloated Marvel writing formula: schoolboy humour must undercut every dramatic moment.

Paul Rudd can do this in his sleep, and at times looks like he is. Evangeline Lily is meaningfully absent. Michael Douglas is enjoyable enough as a bumbling octogenarian ant-enthusiast. The real emotional weight of the film comes from Michelle Pfeiffer and Jonathan Majors. Pfeiffer’s Janet is a haunted and scarred heroine, lying to escape a past she cannot outrun. She brings genuine depth and tension to the film, especially in her scenes with Majors. He is masterful as Kang, bringing both a physical and emotional presence that is wonderfully intimidating. He takes the work seriously, giving us a Shakespearean villain who is neither hammy nor po-faced. I’m a little peeved that yet again Marvel is giving us a ‘conflicted villain’ (it would be nice to have a battle between good and evil, black and white, rather than just shades of grey) but Majors is so good he won me over. Overall, it’s a slog and not worth seeing unless one is a Marvel completist.

2 stars.

Knock at the Cabin

A close-up of a father holding his daughter close to his face.

Eric and Wen, played by Kristen Cui and Jonathan Groff.

Having sat through the literary assault of the Ant-Man script, I dreaded Knock at the Cabin. I have a soft-spot for M. Night Shyamalan, but his scripts are clanger-city. They’re exercises in verbiage (irony noted) that one endures to enjoy a good spook. I was pleasantly surprised, and silently grateful to co-writers Steve Desmon and Michael Sherman for reining in the worst of the ‘M.Night-isms’.

It is an efficient chiller. Eric and Andrew have brought their adoptive daughter Wen to a secluded cabin for a holiday. This turns into a hostage situation when four seeming strangers with odd weapons take them hostage and demand the family sacrifice one of their own to stop the coming apocalypse. As the drama unfolds we learn the four home-invaders are just ordinary people who have put their faith in visions that have led them to this action. As time runs out and people die the family is left to weigh the dreadful moral problem before them.

The film delivers its tension well – Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography elevating mundane conversations to new heights of the uncanny with shallow-focus and tilted cameras. The performances are solid. It’s nice to see Rupert Grint on the big-screen again, and Jonathan Groff brings a compassionate vulnerability to the character of Eric. The standout has to be David Bautista as the de facto leader of the attackers. He plays off his imposing physical presence perfectly, creating a shy and nebbish personality, unfailingly polite and apologetic. It heightens the tension throughout the entire film and the viewer wonders when or even if this hulking mass will lose violent control.

The film departs from its sources conclusion (2018’s The Cabin at the End of the World) to strike a more obviously tragic but also optimistic and possibly even Christian tone. It’s worth a watch on a rainy afternoon.

3.5 stars.

What’s Love Got to Do With It?

A couple stand and smile at a Pakistani wedding celebration.

Shazad Latif and Lily James play Kazim and Cath.

From a dud-script, to a better-than-expected script, to a great rom-com script. What’s Love Got to Do With It? is the first screenplay by Jemima Khan, and it is a terrific debut. Khan presents the tale of Zoe, who tries to boost her career as a documentary film maker by documenting the arranged-marriage of her Pakistani childhood friend Kaz. From the first meeting with the matchmaker to the big day itself Zoe learns about a culture and a practice that is completely alien to her own understanding… but perhaps she’ll learn something about it, and about herself. Is ‘assisted-marriage’ as it is now called ("Oh, like assisted-suicide" Zoe quips) a regressive practice? Is the world of Western dating a freeing alternative? Is there something to learn from allowing commitment to come first, and romance and love to build over time? What lengths will one go to in an effort to please their family?

It’s just lovely. Really lovely. A laugh-out-loud script that reminded me of Richard Curtis via Gurinder Chadha, a story that takes you from A to B with very few surprises (if you want intrigue don’t see a rom-com) but plenty of smiles, perfectly pitched performances, and a refreshing take on the notions of romance and marriage. All of this is tied together with a sublime turn by Emma Thompson. She steals every scene as Zoe’s politically incorrect and gaffe-prone mother. Every time she was on screen I was somewhere between guffawing and wetting myself with laughter. I’ve seen it twice now and loved it both times, but what’s more important, my wife loved it almost more than I did. If I had one complaint, it is that in a noble effort to conform to the great rom-com formula, Khan doesn’t quite seem to have the courage in her convictions. There is a fascinating, heart-warming, and genuinely positive portrayal of assisted marriage throughout the film…but the laws of rom-coms are such that romance must win out. It’s only a small quibble, and it doesn’t ruin the film; but I was left slightly deflated that this exploration felt incomplete. Still…a small criticism. It’s wonderful. Go and see it!

4.5 stars.

The family dynamic

Three very different films – horror, superhero, rom-com – with a common theme: family. Each film has the family dynamic as a driving force for the narrative. In Knock at the Cabin we have an ‘alternative family’ struggling not only with the trolley-problem on steroids, but also with doubt and constant suspicion. Is this real or a homophobic attack? Is our family chosen because people don’t believe we are a family? What does it mean to be a family that is entirely ‘chosen’? In Ant-Man the supposed emotional drive is Scott’s desperate wish to be part of his daughter’s life and make-up for lost time. There is a wonderful opportunity for tension and conflict when Kang (master of time as well as dimensions) offers to reward Scott by sending him back to before the snap to live out his daughter’s teenage years…squandered by sloppy storytelling, but a fascinating thought. In What’s Love Got to Do with It? Kaz is driven to seeking assisted marriage out of a sense of loyalty to his family, and the wish to begin a new one.

Each film posits the family structure and the family relationship as fundamental to human life, and the base motivation for human action: fight to reunite family, marry to please family, let the world burn to preserve family. For Christianity this is not a simple issue. Christianity has inherited a great deal from its Jewish roots, and fecundity and family-life is viewed as a good. Family life is presupposed by St Paul when writing advice on how a bishop ought to behave, and the family is often called the ‘aboriginal church’: the simplest unit through which the Christian faith is taught and practised.

And yet… Jesus refuses to see His mother and brothers and calls those listening to His teachings His mother and brothers; Jesus says that we will not have husbands and wives in the new heaven and new earth; Jesus also says to follow Him rather than bury our father; St Paul consistently argues that a single life devoted to God is to be preferred to marriage; the visions of Revelation suggest our time will be rather taken up with the worship of God (leaving little time to play catch or have a Sunday roast or argue over a game of Monopoly).

In seeking to heal their familial wounds Scott and Cassie nearly destroy the multiverse; and please don’t believe that it’s their love that saves it…Michael Douglas and his giant ants save the multiverse.

For the Christian, family life is not and cannot be the highest good, for to make anything other than God one’s ultimate good is dangerous folly. In seeking to heal their familial wounds Scott and Cassie nearly destroy the multiverse; and please don’t believe that it’s their love that saves it…Michael Douglas and his giant ants save the multiverse. On a smaller scale, Kaz nearly destines himself to a life of misery in an effort to please his family. M. Night departs from his literary source to give a hopeful ending: rather than sticking as a family in the face of an apocalypse they could avert, Groff’s Eric chooses to sacrifice himself. Like all good things, family ties and family loyalties and family loves can be just as destructive as they are life-giving.

The truth about the family that Christianity teaches is that the family is a wonderful and holy gift from God insofar as it reflects the goodness of God. Marriage is good and holy because it reflects and symbolises the love that Jesus has for His Church. Procreation is good because it fulfils God’s command for humanity to be fruitful. Family life is good because it is a space in which Christian love is able to flourish.

As soon as we forget that family life is a reflection of God, family life becomes a burden – and this is so easy to do. We can fetishise family life, demonise or diminish those who do not have a family, ignore those who are happily single; and all of this is wrong and hurtful and damaging. The epitome of the family in the Christian worldview is one where the completely self-giving love, which we see perfectly in Jesus Christ, is allowed to grow and flourish. Oddly enough, this is why Knock at the Cabin has the most Christian depiction of family life. In spite of it being a gay couple with an adopted child (not an uncontroversial idea in the modern Church) it is the one family that demonstrates the principle of sacrificing one’s self for the good of the other. That is what family is – a place where we learn to be willing to die for those we love, and even for those we have never met, and so modelling the Jesus who dies for the sins of the world.

Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.