Edie: a gradual reawakening to hope

A film about redeeming wasted years, with an extraordinary performance from Sheila Hancock

When we meet her, Edith Moore (Sheila Hancock) has given up on herself. Newly widowed in her eighties, staring down her own lonely decline in a retirement home, she has few good memories to look back on. Her life has been a long series of disappointments.
 
But somewhere beneath her bitter exterior, there’s still a spark. Edie was once a happy child and a lively young woman who dreamed of adventure. Something inside her isn’t ready to surrender just yet: so, on a mad whim, she gets on a train to Scotland. Her goal is to summit Mt Suilven, the mountain she always planned to climb with her late father - and so to salvage just one of her many unrealised dreams.
 
Edie, the new film in cinemas this Friday (25th May), tells a simple story of woman versus wilderness. In an extraordinary performance, Sheila Hancock deftly conveys a lifetime of repression and regret, as well as Edie’s gradual reawakening to hope. Her experience will be familiar to anyone who’s faced disappointment - which is, arguably, all of us. There are any number of circumstances which can ‘steal, kill and destroy’ (John 10:10) our God-given passions and potential, leaving us a shadow of ourselves.
 
Watching Edie reclaim herself and redeem her wasted years is a joyful thing, and a reminder that it’s never too late for any of us to do the same. For Edie this change comes through an immersion in the beauty of nature; through overcoming a tough physical challenge; and through her unexpected friendship with her younger guide, Jonny (Kevin Guthrie). For those of us who believe, we know that God can restore any life - that even when we can’t imagine a future for ourselves, he never gives up on us.  
 

Edie will be in cinemas from 25 May.
 
This article comes from Damaris Media, who create free film resources for community groups.