Eerie Act of God Gives Lightning Strike Goosebumps

In the U.S., your chances of being struck by lightning are 1 in 280,000. The odds of winning the Washington Lotto are 1 in 6,991,908. So you're 25 times more likely to regret going out in that thunderstorm.

Opening October 30 at SIFF Cinema at McCaw Hall, the lightning-strike documentary Act of God (through November 5, tickets: $10) is directed Jennifer Baichwal, who earlier gave us Manufactured Landscapes. That may be enough to get plenty of you into the theater, but the movie's combination of sheer visual spectacle, heartbreak, and existential questioning makes it unique.

I'm not saying you can't miss it, but if you go, I think there's a good chance you'll be surprised at the intensity of your response. You leave the theater feeling a bit singed and hallucinating the smell of freshly formed ozone.

There's no narrator as such--Baichwal moves from interview to interview, with astonishing visuals of lightning strikes intercut with the series of "talking heads." Some have won this lottery--whether they were hit themselves or survived while someone just next to them didn't. And while many of them refuse to call it an "act of God"--the hand of fate--the experience is life-changing.

For the novelist Paul Auster, who seems to remember the moment at camp as if it were yesterday, there is a profoundly contingent side to life. He was 14, the camp kids were running through a rain storm, and one second there was a boy next to him, the next...not.

Near Grenoble, France, Baichwal visited with a man who runs a lightning museum--he's something of a storm chaser and the results are awesome. In Vegas, she filmed a former Marine who was struck by lightning and was clinically dead for almost half an hour. 

Baichwal also juxtaposes "wild" lightning with that found in guitarist Fred Frith's brain scans (his psychologist brother is curious what goes on in there), and visits with people who worship Santeria's god of lightning. This feels more like familiar documentary territory, providing "perspectives."

What is terrible about the survivor's stories is that there is no perspectival distance to speak of. It's immediate, before them. Parents second-guess letting a child go to church. A man runs blindly through a forest. Paul Auster turns to look at the barb-wire fence.