The latest from evangelical Christian producers Pinnacle Peak – formerly Pure Flix, the money behind the surprisingly enduring God’s Not Dead series – is an adaptation of a Francine Rivers novel that remaps the biblical tale of Hosea on to a western goldrush setting. That synopsis suggests a level of creative imagination and ambition, possibly something like Michael Winterbottom hauling The Mayor of Casterbridge further west for 2000’s The Claim. Yet this movie thinly scatters a parable’s worth of plot across 134 minutes and resembles HBO’s Deadwood recut for Sunday-school purposes: pious, puzzling and punitive, with a sternly wagging finger never far from entering the frame.
Let us give Pinnacle Peak this: they’re getting mildly more sophisticated about delivering The Message. DJ Caruso, a studio director of the mid-00s thrillers Taking Lives and Disturbia, gives the courtship of soulfully bestubbled farmer Michael Hosea (Tom Lewis) and Pair-a-Dice’s star sex worker Angel (Abigail Cowen) a sunny, handsome, Nicholas Sparks-like sheen. (It’s the best-looking faith movie since 2014’s Heaven Is For Real.) And unlike the early, cheaper Pure Flix ventures, this one has proper actors. Famke Janssen enjoys herself as a brothel madam, while the leads – raised exclusively on wholegrain breakfast cereal – are sincere enough in their Best Little Whorehouse on the Prairie way.
Still, Caruso is relying on this competency to smooth us past activity ranging from the not-quite-credible via the very bizarre to the openly warped. Sex-positive this is not; sex-petrified is closer to it. Angel’s abuse by various sketchily defined brutes is the only action in town, while our virtuous hero resists her charms; ice-cold lakes, wood-chopping and banjo-plucking provide unintentionally amusing displacement activity. You can imagine a Guy Maddin or John Waters version that uncouples the chastity belt to revel in this script’s campier, schlockier, more wanton aspects. It would doubtless spook the Pinnacle Peak faithful – but that’s what separates art from diligently illustrated sermons such as this.
• Redeeming Love is released on 16 September in cinemas.
