Will Conspiracy Thriller ‘Sound of Freedom’ Be a Surprise Hit in the UK?
I’ve not seen Sound of Freedom, and I’m not very likely to see Sound of Freedom. I’d wager that I’m one of the majority in the UK who are absolutely baffled by the success of the conspiracy thriller Sound of Freedom, and are rubbernecking at the whole thing with bemusement, like our table has gone very quiet at a restaurant because we’re eavesdropping on a proper argument kicking off on the table next to us.
But the news is that the film’s runaway success in America – it’s so far taken north of $173 million at cinemas on a $14.5 million budget, and outperformed Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning: Part One last weekend – has got a 31 August release date in the UK should ring some pretty loud alarm bells.
A quick precis of Sound of Freedom: a Homeland Security guy called Tim Ballard works to free children from a shadowy trafficking ring in Colombia. After a crisis of conscience, he decides the best way to do this is by pretending to be one of the perpetrators, infiltrating the ring and Liam Neeson-ing his way back out.
A slightly less quick precis of the noise around Sound of Freedom: despite styling itself as a true story, there are quite a lot of divergences from the truth of Ballard’s work, and Ballard has been accused of embellishing his own involvement in the kinds of cases that the film depicts. Experts in child sex trafficking have lined up to say that what happens in Sound of Freedom, where kids are snatched off the streets by shadowy strangers, bears very little resemblance to the real thing.
The film was finished in 2018 and shelved, so before QAnon went mainstream. But Sound of Freedom’s star Jim Cavaziel, who plays Ballard, has been very vocal in his support for Q Anon conspiracy theories, and alleged – and unproven – child sex trafficking is the cornerstone of Q believers’ mistrust of elites in Washington and Hollywood.
The film itself has had mixed reviews. Rolling Stone’s Miles Klee found it a “stomach-turning experience, fetishising the torture of its child victims and lingering over lush preludes to their sexual abuse”. Other reviewers have conceded that it’s a solidly made movie which, if you didn’t know about all the QAnon stuff, would be entirely acceptable multiplex fare.
Certainly, while QAnon isn’t directly referenced within Sound of Freedom, it has become a lightning rod for Q believers. Mark Rothschild, who wrote a whole book about QAnon and how it functions, told NPR that Sound of Freedom is “being marketed to QAnon believers, it’s being embraced by this community, and its leading actor is a huge part of the QAnon community”. It’s Q-adjacent, even if it’s not actually about Q, and there’s apparently a streak of evangelical Christianity to the whole thing.
People on the right are baffled as to why people on the left are so angry about a film raising awareness about a heinous crime; people on the left are aghast that people on the right think that this is in any way an accurate, productive or seemly way to do that.
In the UK, we like to think that as dysfunctional and counterproductive many of the things that make our country distinct from any other definitely are, we are at least not trying to navigate our lives with the Christian right wing sticking its hassocks into our business and with conspiracy theorists very much in the minority in government. At the very least, various ministers’ references to shadowy forces as The Blob should mean that it stays too inherently funny to really take hold.
The kinds of outwardly faith-led films which have done well in America rarely make it over here at all. The Passion of the Christ took around £15 million here, but look at the rest of the top 10 biggest Christian movies and learn of the existence of The Shack, which made just $123,000 of its $97 million global box office in the UK, and Heaven is for Real, which took $101 million worldwide and $69,000 in the UK.
We’re not missing much, you might reasonably assume. However, the fact that Sound of Freedom is coming out here is a pointer that our sense of superiority is hopelessly misplaced, and always was. In fact, I think we’ll be slightly shocked by how well Sound of Freedom ends up doing here. If you’ve listened to the BBC’s Marianna Spring reporting from Totnes in Devon for her podcast Marianna in Conspiracyland, you’ll have heard that there are hardened communities of conspiratorial thinkers in the UK.
Totnes has long been a place where alternative lifestyles and viewpoints are welcomed, but since the pandemic and with the updraft of Covid conspiracies there’s been a coalescence of many disparate strands of conspiratorial thinking into a unified – if confused and nonsensical – mistrust of nearly every kind of authority and truth which comes from outside the group of insiders.
It’s not a lot of people, but it is enough. A more generalised, low level malaise has settled in too. You probably don’t trust the police, or the government, or energy companies, or whatever delivery firm has launched your new trainers behind a skip and will get away with it, again.
These movies can do genuine, real-world damage too. Sound of Freedom has already been under fire from people who actually know about child trafficking. “What they [audiences] are learning is so divorced from reality that it does sling back to create harm,” Erin Albright, a lawyer specialising in anti-trafficking measures, told Rolling Stone. “It creates harm when certain policies aren’t passed because we think trafficking looks one way and it’s another way. It creates harm when victims don’t recognise themselves in these narratives.”
We’re not immune from the kinds of unreality which we think are unique to America, and we’re not so cynical that a uniquely British form of it hasn’t already taken hold in some parts. Sound of Freedom could end up being the hit that the faith-based film industry has been looking for in the UK for decades – and if it is, it’ll be a confirmation of our long, slow slide toward the weirdness.
