The latest offering from Angel Studios, Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot, is the true story of a predominantly black community in East Texas where twenty-two families belonging to a single church in the late 1990s adopted seventy-seven foster children.
It’s a beautiful movie.
The Reverend W. C. Martin (Demetrius Grosse) and his wife, “The First Lady” Donna Martin (Nika King), adopt four of the hardest-to-place children in the foster care system. Social worker Susan Ramsey (Elizabeth Mitchell, of Lost fame) tries to persuade the couple not to adopt a young girl called Terri (Diaana Babnicova), a child so badly traumatized that she is almost impossible to endure: she thinks she’s a cat. Yet the Martins insist. The many difficulties they face with Terri and their other adopted children, and the troubles of the other families within the church who follow their example, are detailed throughout the film.
It’s a movie about Christian charity—and how hard it can be.
Sound of Hope, in theaters nationwide, is not a complicated film, and that’s a good thing. It’s an inspiring tale that doesn’t try to surprise viewers, because that’s not the point. It delivers what the audience would expect when purchasing their tickets. Hope’s simplicity is integral to its quality.
This is the kind of “basic” movie I grew up watching, as a part of Generation X, and it will feel familiar to other generations born in the twentieth century, too. It’s a movie made for regular people of any age or class; it puts on no airs.
Angel Studios makes normal movies for normal people in an age when that can be rare. Their movies are for the people coming to see them—and for moviegoers as they are, not as some Los Angeles director or producer would like his audiences to be.
Much of Hollywood has spent years trying to corral general audiences into buying whatever strange woke, trans, racialized, gender-fluid “ism” elites happen to be selling at a given moment. Angel Studios’ works are not necessarily aimed at attacking such ideologies, but they are free and clear of them.
They are an escape from a Hollywood that too often seeks to impose its values on us.
Sound of Hope is not a sequel, but it thematically resembles Angel Studios’ 2023 monster hit movie about sex trafficking, Sound of Freedom, in that both are about saving children at risk. Freedom made $250 million.
Many critics portrayed Sound of Freedom as a right-wing Christian extremist film, on account of the lead actor Jim Caviezel’s alleged promotion of conspiracy theories. The Nation called it a “QAnon Fever Dream.”
It wasn’t that.
How many critics actually watched it?
Utah-based Angel Studios can fairly be called a Christian company, but its offerings vary in how Christian they are, a fact many critics have overlooked.
Angel Studios was founded by Mormon brothers; its films portray stories drawn from a variety of Catholic and Protestant sources, as well as non-religious ones.
The studio’s digitally distributed television series about Jesus, The Chosen, was obviously Christian. It also delivered big box office numbers when it was shown in theaters.
Cabrini, released in March, was about an immigrant nun who overcame adversity in late nineteenth-century New York City to create a global network of hospitals. It too made healthy profits and enjoyed a long theater run. In addition, Cabrini has a near perfect score among viewers and reviewers whose opinions are compiled on Rotten Tomatoes.
In May, Sight, about an immigrant eye surgeon struggling to help blind children see, had religious overtones. Sound of Freedom was not a Christian film in any explicit way. Sound of Hope is.
Angel Studios seems primarily concerned with reaching large audiences whether or not they are labeled conservative or Christian. Its various offerings share a level of quality not commonly achieved by other Christian-based or Christian-adjacent companies of the past, which may or may not have had faith but lacked talent to appeal beyond the proverbial choir.
As the iconic King of the Hill cartoon character Hank Hill once said about terrible Christian rock bands, “Can’t you see you’re not making Christianity better, you’re just making rock’n’roll worse?”
Angel Studios makes good movies its priority. It’s hard to imagine this company being as commercially successful as it has been if its products were all message and no entertainment.
I tend to go to movie theaters on weekdays during the daytime, when the crowds are generally smaller than on a Friday or Saturday night. I saw Sound of Hope on a Friday at noon on its second day of release in my hometown of Charleston, South Carolina.
The theater was roughly 70 percent full, the audience about half black and half white. It was seemingly working-class people and retirees. The movie was well received—there was applause at the end, with a smattering of sniffles and “amens” throughout.
At the end of each Angel Studios movie there is a plea to “pay it forward” by purchasing tickets for other people through a barcode that is presented on-screen. At my showing, a significant number of people were doing just that.
The studio’s overall intention is to circumvent what its founders have described as Hollywood’s “gatekeeping.” Movie pitches for the studio are filtered through an “Angel Guild” that currently has more than 100,000 members who pay a base membership fee of $20 a month. The guild largely crowdfunds Angel productions, voting on what they want and don’t want to support.
As co-founder Neal Harmon put it: “Angel’s fine with the craft of Hollywood and the capability, but then the gatekeeper and the decision-making we feel like has lost its way, it’s trapped in a bubble. And we’ve flipped the power structure so that the Angel community, the Angel Guild makes the decisions, rather than a few elite decision-makers.”
Sound of Hope may not match Sound of Freedom’s meteoric success. As of this writing, the movie has not come close to replicating the financial performance of the earlier film. But my aunt asked me about Hope and plans to see it. My grandmother asked me about it too. Word of mouth was a primary driver behind Sound of Freedom’s ascent.
Whatever Sound of Hope ultimately earns, it advances a goal that powerfully motivates Angel Studios and its fans: independence—rejecting elites and their diktats, getting away from how low minds in high places want to define us, and getting back to what best defines normal.