Since it genuinely brings me absolutely no joy to take a huge steaming verbal dump all over a small movie that was clearly someone's passion project, I'm going to start with some positives:
The film is (for the most part) quite nicely shot, made even more impressive considering the puny $250,000 budget. I was also impressed with the performance of Sara Seyed, who portrays Sarah. She gave it her all and her complex emotions often shone through.
There were about 20 minutes worth of compelling, interesting scenes that explored intelligent potential aspects of Abraham's grief and guilt-inducing past.
I wish I could praise more (as the filmmaker was clearly passionate about this story), but this film is so monumentally flawed in every other respect as to cause it to not even remotely function as a narrative feature.
This story would have worked well as a 20-30 minute short film. As it stands at its bloated 101 minutes, it's one of the most horrendously paced, boring films I've ever sat through in a theater.
Scene after scene consists solely of characters sitting and talking; shot, reverse shot. Over and over again. But the conversations the characters have are rarely interesting enough to carry the scenes. Again and again the story is burdened by characters blabbering the exact same information and themes to the audience, just with different wording.
Oh. And the flashback sequences. Good grief, there are so many of them; and again several of them just repeat information we've already been told earlier in the movie.
To pad the runtime to feature length, two subplots were added that aren't mentioned in the biblical text. That's all well and good; but they're completely pointless and amount to nothing, both narratively and thematically.
The first of these subplots involves one of Abraham's servants expressing bitterness about his station as a slave, and it results in some maddeningly surface-level discussions about the topic that repeat themselves many times throughout the story, only to remain completely unresolved by the film's conclusion.
The second of these subplots features enemy soldiers running a human trafficking/sex slavery enterprise, and its laughably executed. Again, it eats up screen time, and only contributes moral confusion to the story as the film ends with the subplot unresolved and an innocent woman being allowed to be kidnapped and sold into slavery. I think the filmmaker was trying to make a connection with Isaac attempting to sacrifice himself for the woman, but totally unsuccessfully? Well, it didn't work at all.
Speaking of Isaac, oh boy, Edaan Moskowitz gave an absolutely terrible performance, with wooden line delivery and oozing unlikeable naivety into his character. I shouldn't want Isaac to die at the end of his story, but I did. That's not good.
I get that most people seeing this movie will enjoy it, and are enjoying it. Good for them. But I want to see more than just biblical characters shown on screen for 100 minutes. I want to see a story with consistent conflict and riveting characters. This can absolutely be accomplished in a biblical film, but not like this.
The film is (for the most part) quite nicely shot, made even more impressive considering the puny $250,000 budget. I was also impressed with the performance of Sara Seyed, who portrays Sarah. She gave it her all and her complex emotions often shone through.
There were about 20 minutes worth of compelling, interesting scenes that explored intelligent potential aspects of Abraham's grief and guilt-inducing past.
I wish I could praise more (as the filmmaker was clearly passionate about this story), but this film is so monumentally flawed in every other respect as to cause it to not even remotely function as a narrative feature.
This story would have worked well as a 20-30 minute short film. As it stands at its bloated 101 minutes, it's one of the most horrendously paced, boring films I've ever sat through in a theater.
Scene after scene consists solely of characters sitting and talking; shot, reverse shot. Over and over again. But the conversations the characters have are rarely interesting enough to carry the scenes. Again and again the story is burdened by characters blabbering the exact same information and themes to the audience, just with different wording.
Oh. And the flashback sequences. Good grief, there are so many of them; and again several of them just repeat information we've already been told earlier in the movie.
To pad the runtime to feature length, two subplots were added that aren't mentioned in the biblical text. That's all well and good; but they're completely pointless and amount to nothing, both narratively and thematically.
The first of these subplots involves one of Abraham's servants expressing bitterness about his station as a slave, and it results in some maddeningly surface-level discussions about the topic that repeat themselves many times throughout the story, only to remain completely unresolved by the film's conclusion.
The second of these subplots features enemy soldiers running a human trafficking/sex slavery enterprise, and its laughably executed. Again, it eats up screen time, and only contributes moral confusion to the story as the film ends with the subplot unresolved and an innocent woman being allowed to be kidnapped and sold into slavery. I think the filmmaker was trying to make a connection with Isaac attempting to sacrifice himself for the woman, but totally unsuccessfully? Well, it didn't work at all.
Speaking of Isaac, oh boy, Edaan Moskowitz gave an absolutely terrible performance, with wooden line delivery and oozing unlikeable naivety into his character. I shouldn't want Isaac to die at the end of his story, but I did. That's not good.
I get that most people seeing this movie will enjoy it, and are enjoying it. Good for them. But I want to see more than just biblical characters shown on screen for 100 minutes. I want to see a story with consistent conflict and riveting characters. This can absolutely be accomplished in a biblical film, but not like this.