The Furnace is a 2019 drama about a woman facing Africa’s toughest race testing her faith when tragedy strikes.
On Christmas day, Mary (Jamie Bernadette), sitting with her new husband Matt (Armand Aucamp) and her parents, gets a pair of running shoes and tickets to South Africa, where the couple will compete in the “The Furnace,” a grueling one-hundred-fifty mile run though the safari. It’s a dream come true, immediately shattered when Matt is killed in a car accident that leaves her broken and on oxygen. Despondent and losing all hope, she soon meets Coffin (Luthili Dlamini), a gravedigger – once a doctor in Africa – who agrees to train her back to health … and racing, though Mary’s father (Craig Gardner) fears it will do her greater harm, forcing him to lie about his daughter and send Coffin back to his homeland. However, Mary is on a quest and finds her way to fight again, and make ‘The Furnace’ the last hurdle in finding her way home.
Christian faith-based, director Darrell Roodt‘s independent release The Furnace has its intentions in the right place, delivering a mostly transparent story of hope and inspiration that is not hard to see where it’s going from scene one. Narrated by Coffin, his husky voice comments on the life of Mary with assorted fortune cookie-esque tidbits as we see her recover via his training methods, slowly getting her off the oxygen tank and reinstilling her need to run. Naturally, this goes against her protective parents, who quite understandably want her to stay safe, though the film doesn’t miss the chance to add in some racism on behest of the mom, who sees ‘Africa’ as a continent of spear-chucking witch doctors.
That aside, the film pits Coffin’s unbreakable belief that God is guiding he and her, against Mary, who is less convinced, giving the credit to Coffin and herself in getting back to running. Coffin, who’s name is of course only a nickname for his job, becomes just as important to the story as Mary, his efforts to help her sort of like a second chance after he was wrongly accused in South Africa for wrongdoings, having spent five years in jail. The film then shifts to Africa, where he goes with some prodding, working as a doctor again. Now shed of all the hurdles, the film gets on with its true mission, putting Mary on the run against the greater challenges of inner strength, and of course, Christian faith.
For that I guess, The Furnace does as promised, its Heavenly themes of belief heavy hitting alongside some genuine story threads of perseverance and endurance. A lot of it is, unfortunately, greatly contrived, symbolism and metaphors sprinkled liberally about in defining Mary’s odyssey. It’s not all that convincing though, rarely any of it feeling authentic despite the filmmaker’s efforts, the dreamy angels-among-us filter a little heavy handed. Still, there’s no denying the cast and crews commitment and – for lack of a better word – devotion to the project, the purpose implicit in delivering its feircely religious message. It’s all very simple but with some good performances and plenty of earnestness that its target audience will mostly likely embrace.