Faith-based drama wraps the unpleasant realities of sex trafficking in victory-in-Jesus sunshine
Still Hope
Starring Luna Rivera
Directed by Richie Johns
Rated PG-13
In limited theatrical distribution Thursday, Feb. 5
If you’re jonesing for a faith-based drama about teen sex trafficking, here you go. This is about a 16-year-old girl, Hope (Luna Rivera), yanked from her comfortable suburban high-school life into the dehumanizing maw of a nefarious trafficking operation.
The fact that it opens with Hope’s family in a white-bread Sunday worship service might give you some idea of where it’s going to go, with Hope ultimately emerging from her ordeal—like Christ, robed in pure white, leaving behind the “empty tomb” of her traumatic past—into bright sunlight, embracing forgiveness…and reciting The Lord’s Prayer.
Still Hope is a based-on-true-stories “message” movie, reminding viewers of the depravities of human trafficking and encouraging them to counter it by supporting faith-based recovery groups like the one to which Hope goes for counseling and rehab—and a big dose of Jesus—after escaping. “There’s a lot of Jesus talk,” a former fellow trafficking victim tells Hope, and indeed there is. If you miss the point, there’s even a big, joyous baptism scene at the end.
This is the kind of movie that suggests that there’s no kind of woe that can’t be wiped and washed away by the so-called blood of the lamb and finding the “peace of Christ.” If it feels like a glorified infomercial for spirituality-inclined sex-trafficking recovery programs, maybe that’s because one of the film’s “collaborative partners” is the co-founder of one of them (the Pure Hope Foundation in Texas, which seeks to bring “light to the darkness” for trafficking victims). Filmmaker Richie Johns, making his debut here as a full-fledged director, cut his teeth as a production assistant on The Chosen, the multi-season TV/video series about the life of Jesus.
So, it’s true to its Bible-based bona fides, but not so much to the raw reality in which it wants to ground itself. For a film set in the murky world of sex trafficking, it never mentions the word sex, and it certainly never depicts it. (And we hear trafficking mentioned just once.) We see Hope dressed in scanty nighties, being delivered to hotel rooms—and in one case, leaving what is assuredly a porno set—to make satchels of cash for her pimp (Alex Veadov). What she’s doing is only referred to as her “job” or her “work.” It’s like a movie about baseball that never shows any baseball players playing baseball.
We meet Hope’s online date (Daniel Reid Ferrell) in a muscle car who drugs her then delivers her to the cartel of black-SUV-driving traffickers. How monstrous are they? Not only do they slap Hope around, beat her with a belt, bruise her and shoot her up with drugs, they later nab a little preteen girl (Averi Curtis) off the street and turn her into a Pretty Baby. (Hello, Epstein Files!) There’s the earnest FBI agent (James Liddell) working to crack the case of Hope’s sudden disappearance, calm her frantic parents (Michelle Haro and John D. Michaels) and track down her captors.
But Rivera, as Hope, is clearly the star of the show. A former high school cheerleader from Florida, here she gets to act all over the place: cowering, sobbing, raging, screaming, running, recoiling, anguishing over haunting flashbacks of her two-year nightmare. Her biggest emoting comes toward the end, in an impassioned outpouring about sin and forgiveness with her rehab counselor (Wilma Rivera).
By dividing screen time between Hope’s hellish ordeal as well as her victory-in-Jesus recovery, the movie feels like a TV crime procedural sandwiched between slabs of church-pew homilies, kinda like a CSI: Sunday School. It won’t win any awards for acting or anything else, but its depiction of transformation, turnaround and even transfiguration from the foul trenches of despicable evil may come as an affirming balm for world-weary believers.
—Neil Pond
The Media Tourist 