Heaven's Door

All the many ways in which this movie is internally inconsistent, nonsensical, and downright messy are too numerous to list. That said, Heaven's Door is designed to appeal to Christians who believe in angels, divine intervention, communications between the living and the dead, and in the ability of certain chosen individuals to use spiritual powers that derive from the dead to heal the sick. For those reasons, believers may find the movie's many story and editing problems acceptable drawbacks. For example, Riley, who is starting to take on the illnesses of those she's cured, learns that the healed are getting sick again. On the other hand, Ben, the hospital janitor, whose eyesight was restored, is NOT relapsing. So why isn't Riley losing her vision? Who exactly is giving her the power to heal people? God? Jesus? Angels? Is it her dead grandpa Nate? Why does Nate's widow ask Nate to help the ailing Riley? What can he do? Why doesn't she ask God?

Most confusing is the sequence in which Riley walks from her hospital room to the room of a girl with cancer. Riley cures the kid, then seems to drop to the floor. With no explanation, a doctor walks down the hall in scrubs, seemingly from surgery. When was the surgery? What was it for?  It feels as if the director didn't shoot enough coverage to fix last-minute story changes, then prayed that divine intervention would fix it all. Equally maddening, we are told that heaven is not a far-off place with puffy clouds, but the camera cuts to puffy clouds at least three times throughout the movie.