‘Sound of Freedom’: a seductive thriller for a paranoid audience

Before Barbenheimer saved the movie business and buoyed the international box office back to its prepandemic heyday, a smaller, independently produced thriller about child trafficking quietly snuck its way onto US screens, outgrossed Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and gave Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning: Part One a serious run for its money.

That film, produced by the predominantly Christian faith-based Angel Studios, is an anti-child-trafficking thriller called Sound of Freedom, which has grossed $164m in the US and arrives on SA screens next week. Starring avowed Christian Jim Caviezel — who has for years claimed that his religiously motivated decision to play Jesus in Mel Gibson’s controversial 2004 film The Passion of the Christ has seen him persecuted by liberal, secular Hollywood — the film is loosely based on the true story of former US department of homeland security officer Tim Ballard. Motivated by his deep Christian faith and moral outrage at the unwillingness of his government to go after child trafficker kingpins, Ballard quit his government job in 2013 to start his own antitrafficking organisation Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), with funding from notorious evangelical, tea party advocate and conspiracy theory spewing pundit Glenn Beck and his listeners.

OUR became known for entrapping child traffickers in countries around the world; making their recordings and videos of these sting operations available to watch online; and even inviting “rich tech bros and celebrities longing to feel like heroes”, to participate, according to a recent Slate.com article.

What the “satanic panic” of the 1980s was to Reagan-era Christian conservatives, child sex trafficking has become to the dangerous QAnon-inspired evangelism of the Donald Trump era far-right. It’s no coincidence that Trump held screenings of the film at Mar-a-Lago in July because while only a fool would believe that the former president is a man of faith, he is a man who knows that QAnon conspiracies have proved increasingly popular with millions of Americans, many of whom support him.

Both Caviezel and the film’s real-life subject Ballard have appeared in recent years on far-right talkshows, platforms and at unapologetically pro-QAnon events to promote hysterical conspiracy theories about child trafficking, including the idea that US furniture company Wayfair is a front for the nefarious practice and that uberrich US child abusers drain the blood of their innocent, terrified victims to produce a serum that prevents ageing.

Having watched the film, it has to be said that on the surface Sound of Freedom is a pretty standard social message thriller that doesn’t parrot any of the wild conspiracies that its secular critics warn about.It does rather ploddingly tell a righteous revenge tale that uses its “based on a true story” opening credit, a postcredit list of facts and a plea from its star to turn the film into “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of 21st-century slavery,” to slyly twist the heart strings of the faithful and the faithfully hysterical to its advantage.

The film has also relied in no small part on its church practice inspired strategy of asking audiences who believe in its message to “pay it forward”, by buying tickets and donating them so that as many people who need to heed its message be provided with an opportunity to do so. It’s a strategy that has been so successful that, at least one unnamed mainstream Hollywood studio, perplexed by the film’s success, decided to commission a survey of social media discussion and audience reaction to try to figure out how the film has managed to outperform traditional tentpole summer blockbusters.

As with so many topics these days, the hot-button one of child sex trafficking has sharply polarised online debate between extreme right-leaning viewers, who dismiss criticism of the movie from the left and mainstream press as the thoughts of “paedophiles, satanists and other malicious parties”, and left-leaning audiences who believe the movie’s messaging is “aligned with QAnon, racism, white supremacy, Christo-fascism, anti-Semitism” and decry it as “overall deceitful”, according to a Hollywood Reporter report.

Though it steers clear of QAnon theories about trafficking, the film paints a somewhat exaggerated picture of the realities of child trafficking to make its point. These include that the practice is especially focused on very young children; that trafficking crimes are committed by strangers; and that the US is the prime destination for children who are trafficked. All of these claims have been shown by the Counter Trafficking Data Collaborative (CTDC), which does the important but difficult work of trying to gather facts about trafficking, to be not quite the truth or conveniently far from it.

According to the CTDC, 67% of trafficked children are 15-17 years old and not young children as depicted in the film and claimed by right-wing fearmongers, and in 41% of recorded cases trafficked children were handed over to their abusers by a family member and not a stranger. The practice is spread across many countries with higher rates of trafficking than the US.

Sound of Freedom cherry-picks its facts to suit the paranoia of its conspiracy-minded audience. But it also, as Noah Berlatsky pointed out in a recent opinion piece for Bloomberg, smartly draws on tropes provided for it and the  QAnon community at large, by previous mainstream Hollywood treatment of the issue. As Berlatsky notes, “QAnon hasn’t changed the tropes, it’s just repurposed them for partisan politics”. This means that ultimately Sound of Freedom is neither a straight up, “QAnon dog whistle,” nor just another morally righteous revenge thriller, rather and more worryingly, it functions as both, creating a coalition of, “feeling, disgust and righteous rage that connect[s] conservative conspiracy theorists with the mainstream” and provides an example of a cultural product that offers the opportunity for a “legitimate problem and dangerous conspiracy theory [to] meet”.

There is enough online debate and controversy to make the film enough of a curiosity for both those who believe its message and those who are sickened by its politics, but whatever your motivations for watching, perhaps its best to do so with some idea of verifiable truth.

• ‘Sound of Freedom’ is on circuit from August 18.