Adam Banks

As the title suggests, the film is about Noah’s Ark, but this ark’s more of a pirate ship than a paradise. Sol Friedman’s Day 40 is his second exploration (and mockery) of faith, and its release has established the filmmaker as an anti-evangelical with a special knack for desecrating the sacred tales, texts, and traditions of religions across the world.

In the bible, the ark is described as a peaceful place, but this iteration of the ark is a hellish, sin-filled pressure cooker that doesn’t seem much better behaved than the world it left behind. Animals act like tyrants, and Noah is pictured as a nerdy simpleton who wears a trucker hat labeled GOD. At first, the saved animals are peaceful, but as time goes on, their patience wears thin, and they start to turn into the beasts that they are. Though the events depicted in this brief tale are dark and profane, they still manage to be playful and clever, never settling in long enough to get boring or predictable. It’s the kind of thing you’ll feel guilty laughing at–in a good way.

According to Sol, the purpose of this film was to “poke fun at the cherished beliefs of hundreds of millions of people,” and though Day 40 is less serious than his previous faith-based film (Bacon & God’s Wrath), it has a similar thesis: religious texts were never meant to be interpreted so literally. “Unfortunately, [I] haven’t had much backlash,” writes Sol. “My wife had GOD-SHIT-HATs made to promote the film and were trying to get religious groups to buy them and burn them.”

In the end, though Sol’s animated ark is unrealistic, it forces us to question the equally unrealistic creation myths we’ve been taught since childhood, and in the process, it proves that films don’t have to be serious or dramatic to raise intriguing philosophical questions about human nature.