The secular, pluralist culture of the West encourages a subjective approach to spiritual truth where stimulating emotional experiences, such as those provided by film, can contribute to personal conceptions of the sacred. Examining Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) as the principal case-study and Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (2009) and Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) as comparative examples, Sarah Balstrup argues that these directors harness the affective properties of film to generate altered states of perception in a manner analogous to religious practice. Powerful...