# The Right Reverend

Canonical source: https://tmff.net/reviews/the-right-reverend/

Published: 2026-11-08 12:00:00 UTC
Updated: 2026-11-08 21:39:41 UTC
Author: Andrei C. Serban




#### Few things are more difficult to represent than the moment when faith ceases to provide meaning yet continues to survive through inertia or despair. In the short film 'The Right Reverend', director Michael Benjamin Walker places precisely this crisis at the centre of a compact and unsettling portrait built around a protagonist who appears to have lost almost everything that could sustain a normal existence.

 

#### Edgar Wallis carries out his life as a reverend within a community that seems stranded on an island of despair and austerity, a setting that, in fact, mirrors his own inner world. The death of his son, financial hardship, and gambling addiction push him into a space where his relationship with the divine becomes less and less a source of consolation and increasingly a form of confrontation. He continues to believe, but his faith takes on something feverish, almost compulsive. And yet an unfortunate accident that unintentionally turns him into a killer finally destroys this fragile balance. It is no longer a matter of trust, but of the need to believe that somewhere in the world there still exists a form of justice capable of making up for what life has taken from him.

 

#### This is also where the psychological interest of the character lies. The reverend has something of Job in him, but also something of the Dostoevskian figures forced to carry their convictions to the point where those convictions become unbearable. Rather than offering an explicit theology, the short film proposes an experience of abandonment, in which God is questioned, invoked, and ultimately accused. Michael Benjamin Walker’s project doesn’t, however, develop every implication of this conflict. The protagonist’s relationship with his son, his past, and the deterioration caused by addiction remain only sketchily drawn, which means that the character sometimes functions more as a psychological core than as a fully developed biography. Yet there is also an advantage to this austerity, especially when the director strips away almost every decorative element and leaves in the foreground a consciousness collapsing under the pressure of silence. The same severity is reflected in the visual style, through the cold, comfortless appearance of the fictional universe, whose spaces seem to reject the protagonist rather than shelter him. Refusing any sentimentality or attempt to soften despair, the short film remains dry, almost hostile, until a final moment that refuses to close off entirely the possibility of a miracle. It’s a smart choice, even though the potential of the film is far from fully explored. Still, while not exhausting all its dramatic possibilities, 'The Right Reverend' succeeds in turning an individual destiny into a metaphor for faith under pressure in a world apparently governed by chance, through an intelligent combination of austerity and moral tension.

 

#### For the density of its psychological conflict, the sobriety of its cinematic construction, and the way it transforms a crisis of faith into a disturbing meditation on abandonment, guilt, and chance, 'The Right Reverend' was awarded the 2nd Film of the Month distinction in the October 2026 edition of TMFF.

 

## TMFF RATING:

 
Click to see other reviews