‘A cold place to have a premiere’: Angel Studios debuts ‘His Only Son’ in Utah
VINEYARD — “Utah is a cold place to have a premiere,” joked Angel Studios co-founder Neal Harmon. Rain drizzled outside on Wednesday as the film “His Only Son” was shown for the first time on the big screen to Angel Studios investors and donors alongside media personalities.
Walking into the Vineyard Megaplex, there was something that you don’t often see at red carpet premieres — some families were in attendance together. As everyone made their way into the theater, there was lots of buzz about “The Chosen” and speculation about what “His Only Son” — releasing in around 2,000 theaters on March 31 — would be like.
The film opened with a message from director David Helling, discussing the origins of the movie. He said that since his conversion to Christianity while serving active duty in the Marines, his passion has been bringing scripture to life. He told the audience to temper their expectations, as the film had a budget of a quarter of a million dollars compared to the typical $50 million Hollywood films have. But, he said, $250,000 can go a long way.
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“His Only Son” details the story of Abraham (Nicolas Mouawad) and Isaac (Edaan Moskowitz). In Genesis 22, God commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac at Moriah. Eventually, as the story goes, Abraham is told to not go forward with the sacrifice and that it was a test. It only spans 18 verses in the chapter, so to make into a feature-length film required a lot of creative reimagining.
Full disclosure — spoilers are ahead.
The film was shot in the middle of the California desert during summer 2019. Daniel de Silva, who has worked with Helling on other projects, said that the location of filming transported him in his mind back to ancient times. He recalled that when he first arrived on set, after driving hours in the middle of nowhere, he went inside Abraham’s tent and said that it even smelled like he thought an ancient tent would smell like.
Setting the events of Genesis 22 as parallel with earlier biblical narratives of how Abram and Sarai became Abraham and Sarah, as well as Sarai’s struggles with infertility, Hagar and the Abrahamic covenant, the film has multiple storylines woven throughout. One theme that ties them together was the difficulty of understanding why God would withhold certain blessings or ask certain things of the family.
Abraham is pensive during the film. Even though Isaac doesn’t know what’s happening, there are close-up shots of Abraham throughout that indicate Abraham’s own emotional struggles with the theophany and command to sacrifice Isaac. Lebanese actor Nicolas Mouawad played Abraham and said that he wanted to portray Abraham as a human being.
Mouawad emphasized that he was in awe of Abraham, but had noticed that some films portray biblical characters more as superheroes than human beings. Throughout his performance, he said he tried to remember that Abraham “is a man who loved God and had a son.” He said that he let that guide his performance.
One of the two young men who accompanies Abraham and Isaac on their three-day journey to Moriah peppers Abraham with difficult questions. In the film, Abraham doesn’t shy away from the questions, even as the young man expresses anger directly to him. That’s one of several examples of how the film goes beyond the biblical text and reconstructs potential storylines and emotions that characters would experience.
Sarai, played by Sara Seyed, for example, doesn’t have much known about her emotional struggles with infertility in the biblical narrative, but in the film, it becomes a central point.
The film is decidedly a Christian take on the story of Abraham and Isaac. Watching closely, there’s imagery of an open tomb, white stones, broken bread, rushing water and other image cues that could remind the audience of Jesus. Other phrases like “death is the penalty for sin” seem to be borrowing from the later text of Romans 6:23 and acts as a verbal cue to remember Jesus.
When Abraham is told to stop sacrificing Isaac and that God will provide a ram, a ram belts out in the background before the scene switches to Jesus on the cross. De Silva said being on the cross for this end scene was the most difficult part of filming. A centurion knelt in front of Jesus and said, “Truly, this was the son of God.”
The final scene is the culmination of parallels between the story of Abraham attempting to sacrifice Isaac and the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Scholars have teased out similarities between these two sacrificial narratives before, and Helling tries to draw these out in the film. Jesus dies at the exact same location as the altar Abraham and Isaac built at Moriah.
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Helling said that he did that because some have said that Jesus died at Moriah and he believes that Abraham attempted to sacrifice Isaac in the same spot that Jesus died. When asked about the historical research he did for the film, Helling said that a lot of the film was directed by prayer and that he’s looked into the anthropological and archaeological record.
In the context of Christian entertainment, the film seems to veer implicitly towards a Christian audience due to the symbolism throughout. When de Silva was asked to sum up the film in one word, he said “belief.” His response encapsulates what seems to be the central focus on the film, comparing Abraham and Isaac’s story with the story of Jesus.
More so on the technical side of the film, the group did a lot with being on a shoestring budget. It takes place entirely outside in the desert and on the mountains. The costumes are typical of biblical productions (and done well), and the cinematography focused on connecting the audience with emotions of the characters, especially Abraham.
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The cinematography also concentrated on how to send visual cues to the audience that they should reflect on Jesus when watching the film. The flashbacks to earlier times of Abraham’s life run into the contemporaneous plot of the film as well as what happens around 2,000 years after Abraham. Since the timing can feel blurry due to the way it’s filmed, that also seems to be the goal.
Helling said that he felt driven to make the film to give believers a response to skeptics about the Abraham story and because he wanted to show these parallels. That was apparent in the plot as well as the cinematography.
If you’d like to see the film in theaters, it premieres nationwide on March 31. Angel Studios provides audience-driven (i.e. crowdfunded) entertainment and “His Only Son” also fell into that category. The distribution of the film in theaters was made possible due to donors.
