'Midwinter Break' offers a rare grown-up love story

Faith-based films have come a long way, baby.

Remember the hardscrabble tales told by the Kendrick Brothers (“Fireproof,” “Facing the Giants”) on shoestring budgets? Think Kirk Cameron and a sea of unfamiliar faces.

'The way that faith shows up in this particular film is around a sense of longing. ... I wanted a sense of yearning for something.'

Or the “God’s Not Dead” franchise, a saga that mainstream critics lined up to smite like so many pinatas?

Now faith is more mainstream than ever in pop culture circles. Amazon teamed up with Jon Erwin’s Kingdom Story Company to create the popular “House of David” series for Prime Video. Netflix partnered with Tyler Perry and DeVon Franklin for a line of original faith-based films, including last year’s “Ruth & Boaz.”

Newer, faith-friendly films boast recognizable stars like Oscar winner Hilary Swank (“Ordinary Angels”), Kelsey Grammer (“Jesus Revolution"), and Dennis Quaid (the “I Can Only Imagine” series).

Defying easy labels

“Midwinter Break” — which hits theaters Friday — offers something that’s aesthetically different while spiritually profound. The indie drama focuses on an older couple, Stella and Gerry (Lesley Manville, Ciarán Hinds), traveling in Amsterdam.

Their decades-old marriage teeters when Stella recalls a traumatic experience and an unfulfilled spiritual promise. The drama looks nothing like a standard faith-based film, which some critics have derided as sanding too many of life’s rough edges smooth.

The story’s core conflict is deeply religious and handled with care. It defies easy labels but may resonate all the same.

“Midwinter Break” director Polly Findlay treats the marriage and subject matter with a delicacy that belies her status as a first-time filmmaker. It helps that she brought a heady background in live theater to the task at hand.

Shared vocabulary

Another obvious benefit? Having two veteran stars building a credible marriage on the brink of collapse. Manville and Hinds also brought significant stage experience to the film, offering a “shared vocabulary” when the cameras turned on, Findlay tells Align.

That, plus three days of rehearsal, ensured the couple’s on-screen bond appeared like it was decades in the making.

“We were able to read [the script] a lot together and build a shared sense of back history,” Findlay said. “They didn’t want to plan too much in advance. They wanted to feel things in the moment, to riff off each other and improvise.”

Manville and Hinds aren’t kids anymore. She’s 69 and he’s 73, and it’s rare for films to feature older couples either falling in love or navigating years of complicated romance.

“That was something I was really drawn to ... a grown-up love story,” she said. “It’s not always documented on screen. The relationship is a series of new beginnings. And so it’s really, really hopeful without being sentimental.”

A key part of the film finds Stella reflecting on a life-changing event in her younger years, a time when she was with child. What flowed from that pivotal moment got lost over the years, but the Amsterdam journey finds it rushing back to the present.

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A life unlived

“For Stella, her faith is very, very real, of course, and very specific. The way in which that faith manifests itself in her is a product of the country that she’s from, the moment in time from which she’s from ... and the things that happened to her in the past,” the director says.

“The thing that she’s carrying with her in a more macro way is ... a thing we can all related to, a sense of a life unlived.”

Manville captures that challenging arc.

“As she gets older ... there’s a whole different Stella that could have been if she made choices differently,” she says.

Different layers

For the director, bringing faith to the screen meant different layers of storytelling.

“The way that faith shows up in this particular film is around a sense of longing. ... I wanted a sense of yearning for something running underneath it,” she says, adding the Amsterdam setting enhances that with its beauty and “sense of melancholy.”

“Midwinter Break” can be heavy, and audiences won’t know if this relationship can survive the couple’s marital chasm. That reflects both Stella’s faith and the harsh realities of any long-term relationship.

It’s a duality that spikes the film’s waning moments.

Some couples can loathe each other in the morning and, later, realize what they’ve built is both precious and vital, she notes.

“Sometimes your emotion toward somebody is red, and sometimes it’s blue. ... You can just go from red to blue without necessarily having to go through purple, because that’s how we are,” she says. “It felt important for those moments of despair and doubt to feel 100% and that somehow the kind of hope you then arrive at is dependent on going through that 100%.”