The third instalment of Walter Peter Blatty’s ‘Trilogy of Faith’, ‘The Ninth Configuration’ is a film about a Colonel Kane, a Vietnam veteran assigned to take charge of a sanitarium for former soldiers discharged from the military due to psychiatric disorders. Dropped into the centre of this precarious and unpredictable community Kane quickly finds himself, mainly as a result of his increasingly intense conversations with the decommissioned astronaut Cutshaw, caught up in a sea of questions: about the nature of virtue and the limits of representation; about religion and its justifications of human and animal suffering; and about his own sanity.