The Sound Of Freedom is a movie whose story of how it came to be released in theaters–and the surprise hit of 2023–is filled with nearly as many twists and turns as the movie itself. Originally produced by 20th Century Fox as a joint American-Colombian film with distribution viewed especially in Latin America, the film languished in post-development limbo after the studio was purchased by Disney, and the film was only released years after production when the film was bought back by the director and then distributed by a novel crowdfunding campaign by Angel Studios for 5M, with ticket sales from the movie already rapidly approaching 100M in the United States even without any foreign release so far. This sort of movie is the type of film that was once produced reliably by American studios, a low-budget portrayal of real-life events that sought to capture widespread sentiments about the desirability of protecting children, but even this message has become deeply and troublingly partisan since the film was originally produced. Perhaps the portrayal of fame-hungry scams that lure innocent children into sex trafficking was deemed as a partisan issue, which ought to be concerning to those in favor of such horrors.

In discussing this film, I do not wish to spoil the film’s contents, though something about the film’s approach needs to be said. Other than a closing message that appears in the credits from lead actor Jim Caviezel, the film is remarkably not heavy-handed in its approach, despite dealing with a heavy subject in the rescue of children from sex trafficking that has a disproportionally American customer base. And even that closing special message calls on the audience to stand up against contemporary slavery, itself not the sort of political stance that should be viewed as remotely partisan or controversial, even to those who lack a belief in God that forms a key part of the film’s message that “God’s children are not for sale.” The film manages to keep its PG-13 rating by not portraying the horrors that the film is about, which has the additional benefit of hopefully reducing the trauma inflicted on its child actors. For me, at least, in watching the film, two aspects of the film hit particularly hard. For one, Caviezel’s Tim Ballard forms a close alliance with a Colombian who purchases underage sex workers to set them free, and the film give the reasoning for this boldly unselfish action as having been the horror he felt at having seen himself as the darkness in the life and in the soul of an underage prostitute he had unknowingly rented in his post-prison condo. The second aspect that hit hard was a scene in which a traumatized Rocio (one of the two children, a brother and sister, at the core of this story) was weeping in the bathtub, which was something I did in distress as a young child myself, and anything that reminds me of my own childhood is going to hit particularly hard.

What makes this film particularly compelling is that it manages to take a very large problem in contemporary slavery, especially the trafficking of vulnerable children across borders to gratify the selfish and corrupt lusts of especially people from wealthier countries, and shrinks it down to a compelling story of a man driven to rescue children from these horrors rather than merely seek to prosecute American child pornographers, as well as the children and what they have seen and experienced themselves, and their Honduran father who seeks the return of both of his kidnapped and abused children. Also compelling, at least to me, is the way that the film portrays the logistics of contemporary slavery, in the way that event planning, shipping, and transportation networks are used to facilitate this dark trade, and the way that leads are gathered by making deals with criminals in the time-honored way of getting people to plead and flip, turning informant. The film gives a generally positive picture of both American and Colombian police efforts against the exploitation of children even as it simultaneously demonstrates the need for private action against the problem of human trafficking as well. How a film that should have mass and general appeal has become yet another front in America’s cultural wars is both baffling and troubling, but the film has rightly struck a deep nerve in the United States, at least.