The Images and the Darkness: Why Sound of Freedom (2023) Is a Focused, Sophisticated Message Movie

One of the most disturbing moments in Sound of Freedom is one of the least graphic. In fact, the scene is so subtle that I can describe its contents in this essay without describing anything explicit. It occurs during the harrowing opening sequence, in which a working father (José Zúñiga) in a Honduran town drops off his young daughter, Rocío (Cristal Paricio), and younger son, Miguel (Lucás Ávila), at what he believes to be an audition for a talent agency. When the father hopes to attend the audition with his kids, the lady managing the audition (Yessica Borroto) brisky tells him no stage fathers are allowed in, and asks him to be back at 7pm sharp. After he leaves, we see the lady direct the excited children in a photo shoot, which starts off as we might presume such an audition would.

The camera is our point of view, and some early smiles and pictures to warm up give way to more mannered poses. We notice that the lady undoes a few buttons on the little boy Miguel’s shirt. Rocío’s long black hair, which had been combed straight with a white headband holding it back, is let out, while lipstick is put on her lips.

The lipstick is the strongest signal, yet the sexualization of the children remains implicit. It’s not overt, but during the shoot it becomes apparent to the viewer that this is not an ordinary photo shoot. There’s something off about the poses, the unbuttoned collars, and the make-up, while still remaining in the realm of a regular photo shoot. In other words, there’s nothing explicitly pornographic going on. Is this only creepy because the audience knows what this movie is about and where all this is going? Or are we supposed to be disturbed by the hints of sexualization, like thick make-up on a little girl? And then the horror of this scenario fully dawns on us. We are watching this. The children are being made to pose for us, the movie audience aligned with the camera’s point of view. Everyday people, such as those who go to movie theatres, so-called normal people, are enabling this billion-dollar human sex trafficking industry. We are the consumer.

This sequence highlights two aspects that make Sound of Freedom better than I expected. In fact, it’s one of the best new releases I’ve seen this year. Both relate to the fact that the film is more sophisticated than most hot takes and take-downs, and even most positive reviews, have noted. 

The first is that the film depicts the demand as well as the supply side of child sex trafficking, making this a multidimensional social drama, in addition to being a taut, gripping procedural thriller. In this manner, the film brings the narrative structures now common to drug thrillers since Traffic (2000) to bear on an increasingly prominent illicit trade, but one that, as far as I can tell, has never received this kind of thriller-exposé treatment. 

The second is that Sound of Freedom is surprisingly formally understated and controlled. The movie is all the more powerful and disturbing for its restraint and focus. What those who complain about the muted tone get wrong is that director Alejandro Monteverde and his crew seem to be consciously avoiding making this an exploitation flick. And, as far as I’m concerned, that is absolutely the correct approach for telling this sad, dark, sordid tale. 

One of the final credit titles informs us that the United States is among the largest consumers of child sex. Although the majority of the film takes place in Central and South America, the United States is always the centre of gravity in the film, its consumers pulling in the horrid trade. Given how the film spends roughly the first 30 minutes focusing on pedophiles in the US, it’s not fair to argue that the film depicts child trafficking as only a scourge of the Latin world. Rather, like in the great drug thriller TV series Narcos (2015–2017), it’s always clear that the black hole of consumption is the US. 

This is evident early on in Sound of Freedom, after the opening credit sequence which shows presumably real security camera footage of children being kidnapped around the world. We soon find out that those pictures we watched being taken in the sequence I described above are now the sinister “spring catalogue” of a pedophile (Kris Avedisian) writing to his followers on the dark web.

We meet Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Special Agent Tim Ballard, played by Jim Caviezel, in the white van outside the pedophile’s house. Ballard and his partner bust the pedophile and discover his archives in a basement full of child dolls, in a scene that evokes the lighting and atmosphere of David Fincher’s Seven (1995). The suburban house with a creepy basement also conjures the American Gothic of The Silence of the Lambs (1991).

It turns out the pedophile is something of a theorist, having written books arguing for the natural pervasiveness of his fantasies and desires. After a conversation with his partner about how few kids they ever rescue, Tim decides to string the pedophile along in order to catch another man going across the southern border into the US with a boy—Miguel.

A quiet conversation between Tim and the rescued Miguel over a burger and fries is the pivotal transformation scene for Tim, when he realizes that he needs to focus on rescuing the children. It’s also one of the most powerful scenes in the movie. The little boy, who has gone through unspeakable things, simply asks Tim if he will rescue his sister, Rocío, and then gives him his St. Timothy medallion. The understated performance from Lucás Ávila makes the moment believable yet wrenching. After talking to his boss, Tim gets a few weeks and a few thousand dollars to go down to Latin America to look for the girl, but when his time and money runs out he chooses to leave Homeland Security and pursue his mission independently. 

Tim eventually joins up with one of the film’s unforeseen pleasures, Vampiro, played by Bill Camp, who is a former cartel guy who reformed after years in prison and now pays to free child sex slaves. Camp brings gusto to his performance, which plays well against Caviezel’s Tim, who is monomaniacally focused and determined. As Tim states to his boss at one point, if he doesn’t succeed in this case, he won’t be able to repair himself. Caviezel brings a suppressed yet furious energy to the role, suggesting a man on the edge of losing his sanity. Caviezel channels his previous work in The Passion of the Christ (2004) and Paul, Apostle of Christ (2018), making Tim a man of sorrows who can also mask himself as an American dude-bro during undercover sting operations.

Caviezel and Camp work well together, along with Eduardo Verástegui’s Paul, a billionaire who helps Tim out with his sting because he “likes to play cop,” and Jorge (Javier Godino), a Colombian police officer who is always pushing up against the limits that his profession imposes on what he can do to stop traffickers. The four actors generate a strong team dynamic, while never being so jokey that we forget the seriousness of their mission. Mira Sorvino shows up in a few conventional scenes as Tim’s wife, encouraging him to fulfill his mission. The best performances are by the girl, Cristal Paricio, and the boy, Lucás Ávila, as they are able to convey deep sorrow alongside the normal mannerisms and expressions of children. They never seem precocious or performative. 

The screenplay, written by Rod Barr and the director, Alejandro Monteverde, focuses on how each step leads to the next in Tim’s mission to track down the girl. Turning this story about a sprawling global industry into a tale of one man trying to rescue one lost girl makes the story clear. The story also becomes an archetypal quest. The knight must rescue the princess stolen by the monster. Barr and Monteverde manage to distill the complexity of the issues into digestible form for a narrative film.

Allusions to other works of film and television help direct the audience’s emotions and to build connections to other, more familiar, areas of crime. The constant atmosphere of dread conjures the great US-Mexico border drama, Sicario (2015). The attention to procedural investigations and criminal operations reminded me of Traffic and Narcos. Historical connections are forged with a sea journey of children in shipping containers recalling the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. The references and allusions to many crime and drug thrillers and historical works situate this hot button issue within a wider fictional and historical universe. Doing so, it makes what is not an easy subject to talk about, and one many do not even want to acknowledge, into something horrible and sad but that also fits within our broken world. Although the film is deeply disturbing, we begin to see the series of motivations and consequences related to the issue of human sex trafficking.

Tim’s eventual journey up river into the jungles of rebel-occupied Columbia recalls Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and its screen adaptation, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), and I’m not the only critic to say so. (Glenn Kenny notes the allusion to Heart of Darkness, and Owen Gleiberman to Apocalypse Now.) Kenny, however, thought these river and jungle sequences were improbable and boring, demonstrating the film’s overall weak and meandering approach. I would counter that the allusions demonstrate the focus and strength of the film’s themes. In both Conrad’s novella and Coppola’s film, the primeval darkness is not only associated with what is up river in the jungle, in nature. The darkness is also located in the heart of civilization, whether that is thought of as Europe or the US, and it cascades outwards through forms of oppression: colonialism, war, slavery. In Sound of Freedom, the journey to the guerrilla stronghold does not obscure or deflect the earlier social criticism of the demand-side of human trafficking. Rather, it links the two. The river of oppression flows both ways, founded on raw power dynamics yet refined through human social and civilizational structures. 

In the film, we see that the rebels in the mountains are using slaves not only for sex but also to work in their cocaine operations. We see women and children crushing the coca leaves with their feet. In the jungle, we see the primeval nature of slavery as, in its rawest form, the unbridled exercising of power over other human beings. A man with a machine gun, or a spear or a club, can make another do what he wants. There is a dark line of humans enslaving humans stretching back to the Romans and the Greeks and even deeper into the ancient world, time out of mind.

Sound of Freedom is at its most perceptive when it links this brute oppression to the darkness of computer rooms and basements in twenty-first century North America, where we see the modern form of slavery and its relation to the creation and distribution of images. A haunting scene early on shows Tim having to watch and transcribe scenes of child pornography to acquire the evidence to prosecute the offenders. Monteverde shows the reflections on Caviezel’s pupils, as if the images are burning into his eyes. The film, through its narrative of closely connected sequential storytelling, helps us remember that each image of a person online actually points to a reality. When the film’s pedophile says he doesn’t indulge his fantasies in real life, that may be a lie, but we also see the connection between the indulgence through pornography and actual sexual and violent acts. They are placed on the same shadowy continuum of evil, even if there is a sequence that leads deeper into the darkness.

The power of images is not only present in the great early sequence I analyzed at the start of this essay. It’s also present near the end of the film, in a scene that makes Sound of Freedom so not the vigilante movie some have denounced it as.

When Tim finally locates Rocío in the jungle, he tells the girl to close her eyes so she won’t see him fight her captor. She opens her eyes a few times, but she, and we the audience, never do clearly see her monster slain. The scene is shot in such a way that we get no thrill from it. There’s nothing visceral or exciting about it. The film is at its most clear sighted in this choice to forego most of the possible gratuitous revenge that cinema so often delights in (an earlier sting operation arrest is the exception that proves the rule). I’m not saying you should not make revenge movies, but, in the case of Sound of Freedom, in a movie so concerned with the danger of images, limiting the depiction of revenge restrains the film’s form to match its message. Furthermore, the filmmakers do not want us to take too much satisfaction in any justice achieved in the film’s story, as they want to catalyze justice in the real world.

Sound of Freedom is not for everyone. While we never see the sickest deeds, I know some people whom I don’t think could stomach seeing a child put in a situation where we can imagine what will happen next, or what has already happened. The film wants to cast light on the darkness many of us thought we could never imagine, and thereby urge political action in the real world. Sound of Freedom denounces, with restraint yet passion, a dark reality that more people should probably muster up the courage to face.

Sound of Freedom (USA, 2023)

Directed by Alejandro Monteverde; written by Rod Barr and Alejandro Monteverde; starring Jim Caviezel, Bill Camp, Mira Sorvino, Eduardo Verástegui, Javier Godino, Cristal Paricio, Lucás Ávila, José Zúñiga, Yessica Borroto, Kris Avedisian.

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