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The Last Sin Eater Our rating: Your rating:   MPAA rating: PG-13 (for thematic elements, and some intense sequences of violence) Genre: Drama Theater release: February 09, 2007 by FoxFaith Directed by: Michael Landon, Jr. Runtime: 1 hour 57 minutes Cast: Liana Liberato (Cadi Forbes), Louise Fletcher (Miz Elda), Henry Thomas (Man of God), Thea Rose (Lilybet), Soren Fulton (Fagan Kai), Stewart Finlay-McLennan (Brogan Kai), Peter Wingfield (Sin Eater), Elizabeth Lackey (Fia Forbes) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

At a time when Christian filmmakers are eager to prove that they can make movies that are just as generic and formulaic as anything Hollywood puts out—Christian political thrillers, Christian serial-killer mysteries, Christian romantic comedies, and the like—there is something to be said for a movie like The Last Sin Eater, which doesn't even try to follow any secular trends. The FoxFaith film, which concerns an obscure quasi-religious ritual that was practiced by some Britons and emigrants from Britain as recently as the 19th century, also puts spiritual concerns front-and-center, instead of trying to smuggle them in through the back door.

So if the characters get a little preachy at times, as people in Christian movies are wont to do … well, at least it fits this story in a more organic sort of way.

Liana Liberato shines as Cadi Forbes

The film takes place in the Appalachian mountains circa 1850, and the title refers to a custom that the characters have brought with them from their native Wales, in which a man—usually a beggar or some similar social outcast—supposedly takes the sins of the newly deceased upon himself in exchange for food and drink. Because sin eaters are thought to have the sins of many people weighing on their souls, they are shunned by their communities, except when someone dies and their services are required—and even then, to look a sin eater in the eye is to invite a curse.

Of course, if you tell someone not to do something, the odds are pretty good that he or she might do it—especially if that person is a child. And so it is that a young girl named Cadi Forbes (Liana Liberato) attends the funeral of her grandmother and looks a particular Sin Eater (Peter Wingfield) right in the eye, while all her friends and relatives are making a point of looking the other way or closing their eyes altogether.

Cadi becomes obsessed with the Sin Eater, and not simply because she is curious to know who he is, where he lives, how he got his peculiar job, or why that blonde woman down the road goes looking for him up the mountain every now and then. Cadi's younger sister died recently, and Cadi feels that the death is somehow her fault; what's more, she believes her mother (Elizabeth Lackey) would have preferred it if Cadi had been the one that died, instead. So, traumatized by the harm that she thinks she has caused, Cadi wants to ask the Sin Eater to take her sins away.

Henry Thomas (right) is the Man of God

You can sense where this is going, right?

Cadi's quest to be cleansed of her sins is helped along by a couple of … well, let's call them visitors. Early on, Cadi walks onto a tree bridge high above a river and contemplates jumping to her death, but—shades of It's a Wonderful Life!—she is interrupted by a mysterious, angelic girl named Lilybet (Thea Rose). Soon after this, Cadi meets an anonymous preacher (E.T.'s Henry Thomas) who spells out the gospel message, letting her know that Jesus is the only "sin eater" she will ever need.

Cadi accepts the preacher's message immediately—she "feels" different after saying the sinner's prayer (or the 19th-century equivalent) in a way that she never felt during her dealings with the Sin Eater—and the question that hangs over the rest of the film is whether the rest of the community will come to accept that message, too. Along the way, Cadi learns about the deep dark secrets that compelled her kin to adopt the custom of having a sin eater in the first place.

The very concept of "sin eating" is so unusual that the film cannot help but be at least a little interesting. However, the movie suffers from the same sense of inevitability that afflicts so many other Christian films; at times you suspect the filmmakers are not all that interested in the phenomenon of "sin eating" for its own sake, but regard it as just another set-up for an evangelistic punch line.

Stewart Finlay-McLennan as the villainous Brogan Kai

The set-up is made to seem even more trivial near the end, when a handful of flashbacks reveal the reason why this community has a "sin eater" in the first place. Instead of exploring the psychological, social or spiritual factors that would sustain such a practice, the film settles for a couple of pat explanations that sound like something ripped out of a historical romance novel. What's more, the original sins committed by this community are so extreme, the average moviegoer might not relate to them, and thus to the community's deep desire for absolution.

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