Faith, Fraud & Minimum Wage is at the crossroads

Josh MacDonald’s play Halo takes a bumpy road to the screen in this micro-budget local feature. Casey (Martha MacIsaac) is a sarcastic teenaged doughnut shop employee who manipulates a coffee spill into a likeness of Christ, an image that the true believers in her small Nova Scotia town come to worship. Casey’s flabbergasted by their gullibility, but willing to capitalize on it so she can support her father (Callum Keith Rennie), who’s struggling to let go of her brain-dead sister. Individual scenes shine with sharp dialogue and insight about the nature of religious belief—the best involve Casey and a dry-witted young Catholic priest (Anderw Bush)—but as a whole the movie is inconsistent. It shoots for both moving drama and clever satire and ends up stranded in between.