Sound of Freedom’s Moral Clarity

I t’s fashionable, nowadays, for stories to have no redeeming characters. But there is plenty of old-school moral clarity in Sound of Freedom, a new release by Angel studios.

The movie takes as its subject one of the most awful evils known to man — child sex trafficking. By the end, there’s a hopeful message, one communicated without the mawkishness or formulaic predictability typically associated with Christian movies.

The movie is based on the true story of husband and father of six, Timothy Ballard (Jim Caviezel), a Homeland Investigations operative hunting pedophiles and child sex traffickers in the United States.

In the film, Ballard’s story runs parallel to that of a sister-brother duo, Rocio (Cristal Aparicio), 11, and Miguel (Lucás Ávila), 9, children from Honduras, lured away from their father by Katy-Gisselle (Yessica Borroto Perryman), a madam posing as an entertainment-business agent.

Most of Ballard’s career involves domestic cases, catching pedophiles in the U.S. through sting operations. But when a new colleague asks how many children he’s saved, Ballard is unsettled by his answer: None (yet).

Later, with the support of his wife Katherine (Mira Sorvino) and the reluctant permission of his boss (Kurt Fuller), Ballard travels to Colombia to rescue Miguel and reunite him with his father.

Ballard won’t rest until he finds Rocio, too. As the official support and financial backing from the U.S. government wanes, he resigns, following the trail deep into rebel territory in the Colombian jungle. He is accompanied by “Vimeo” (Bill Camp), a reformed criminal, dedicated to buying and freeing child sex slaves. The two pose as U.N. doctors bringing vaccines to the region. These are some of the movie’s most action-packed scenes.

The movie was initially filmed in 2018 but put on hold when Disney acquired its producer, 20th Century Studios. In the end, it was Angel Studios, a small faith-based producer known mostly for religious movies and the surprise-hit TV series The Chosen, that oversaw its release. Sound of Freedom got off to an unusually successful start at the box office. On July 4, its sales were on par with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’s.

The movie has also drawn critics and detractors. A critic for the Guardian described it as a “QAnon-adjacent thriller seducing America” and “paranoid.”  The QAnon conspiracy held that child sex traffickers operate within the “deep state.” Is it “QAnon adjacent” to suggest that child sex traffickers operate anywhere?

Consider it this way. Let’s say this film fuels a “moral panic” or that we’re overestimating the problem of child sex trafficking. The harm in this would be, at worst, wasted energy and a disproportionate use of resources. But what if, contrary to the status quo narrative, we are underestimating the problem of child sex trafficking? Or even turning a blind eye? The harm there would be the widescale sexual abuse of children, left unchallenged.

It’s difficult to obtain reliable figures for the number of victims of child sex trafficking. But whether the figures are in the hundreds or thousands in any country, there’s no doubt that it’s real. According to a 2019 New York Times article, technology companies reported a record of 45 million online photos and videos of child sexual abuse in the previous year. The United Nations’ 2020 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons noted that one in every three victims of human trafficking is a child and, furthermore, “globally, most victims are trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation.”

After the end of the movie, the postscript appears, reminding audiences that “there are more humans trapped in slavery today than at any point in history — including when slavery was legal.” And yet, most of the slavery that exercises people today is historic.

Ballard says in the movie that the subject of child sexual abuse is “too ugly for polite conversation.” And many parts of the film are difficult to watch. Unlike the controversial French film Cuties, which depicted child sexual exploitation by simulating it, Sound of Freedom succeeds by suggestion.

In one scene, we see Ballard watching videos in a Homeland Security software system, documenting what they contain. The camera zooms in on Ballard’s tear-filled eyes. In another scene, Miguel is examined in private by a medical doctor, who confirms that “he has lacerations consistent with sexual abuse.”

In the action movie Taken, in which Bryan Mill (Liam Neeson), a retired CIA operative, hunts down his daughter’s abductors — the victim is unscathed at the point of rescue, her innocence left intact. More realistically, Sound of Freedom does not spare its characters the awful fate of sexual abuse. The filmmakers evoke the audience’s horror and empathy in equal proportions.

“This job tears you to pieces, and this is my one chance to put those pieces back together,” Ballard tells his boss. In this way, Miguel and Rocio are supposed to represent all victims of child sexual abuse. Engaging with this subject matter takes its tolls even on actors. And audiences, too. The movie ends with a “special message” from Caviezel who gets choked up as he urges moviegoers to “pay it forward,” using a QR code to buy and share tickets for others.

Sound of Freedom is provocative and gripping, as any thriller ought to be. But it goes deeper than that, reminding us that as long as children are being abused, no matter where they are or how many there are, the rest of us ought to care.