Tina Christian Review
Tina… on the surface, it feels like a quiet drama about grief. A woman who lost her daughter in the Christchurch earthquake. A substitute teacher walking into a polished private school. But under the surface, it’s a story about brokenness, healing, and the desperate need for love.
Mareta Percival—played with quiet intensity—steps into a world that looks perfect from the outside. Polished hallways, well-dressed students, wealthy families. But what she finds is shocking: kids starving not for food, but for guidance, inspiration, and care. They have everything money can buy, but nothing their souls actually need.
From a Christian lens, this resonates deeply. James 1:27 says, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress.” These students may not be orphans in the literal sense, but they’re abandoned in spirit. Mareta becomes, almost accidentally, a shepherd. Her grief collides with their emptiness—and somehow, grace begins to seep through.
Family-friendliness? This is heartfelt, emotional, and at times heavy. It’s not graphic or filled with profanity, but its themes of loss, trauma, and brokenness may be too weighty for young children. Still, for teens and adults, it carries the kind of impact that sparks conversation long after the credits roll.
Positive role models? Mareta herself. She’s imperfect, grieving, reluctant. But she steps in where others won’t. She listens, she cares, she challenges. And in that, she mirrors Christ’s love in subtle ways. She doesn’t preach, but she embodies compassion—and that’s often the loudest sermon of all.
Spiritually, the film never explicitly mentions God. But His fingerprints are everywhere. The very act of bringing comfort, guidance, and sacrificial love to the broken is Biblical. 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 reminds us: “The God of all comfort… comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.” That verse could easily sit at the heart of this story.
Verdict? Tina is not a “Christian movie” by label, but it carries Christ-like echoes throughout. It’s a meditation on grief, but also on purpose—that sometimes, our deepest wounds prepare us to heal others. It’s tender, aching, and quietly beautiful.
And maybe that’s the lasting message: that even in loss, God redeems. He plants us in places we never expected, and through our pain, others find hope.
