The binding of Isaac, coming to theatres next month!
His Only Son is being promoted by the same studio that makes The Chosen.
It’s only been a week since The Chosen wrapped its third season. Now comes word that another biblical story is coming to the big screen—and it’s coming out next month.
The film in question is His Only Son, a dramatization of the story from Genesis 22 in which God tells Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac on an altar.
The film has been in the works for a few years—director David Helling posted a trailer for it to his YouTube channel way back in June 2020!—and now that it’s finally complete, Angel Studios, the company behind crowdfunded series like The Chosen, is looking for investors to help put the film in theatres on March 31.
Prospective investors can back the film’s distribution at this website.
As of this writing, investors had pledged $733,408 to the project—enough to send the film to about 750 theatres. The studio is hoping to reach $1,235,000 by Sunday.
You can check out some videos for the film below.
First, here is the trailer that was posted almost three years ago:
Second, here is a video in which Helling describes the intentions behind the film; the video includes a 7-minute clip in which Abraham spells out the film’s theology:
A few extra thoughts and facts about this film:
Abraham is played by Nicolas Mouawad, a Lebanese actor who played another biblical character, King Solomon, in Three Thousand Years of Longing last year. As of last summer, he was also attached to play Jesus in a film called Jesus and the Others, but the IMDb is hiding a lot of that film’s information behind a paywall now, so I don’t know if Mouawad is still attached to that film.
I’m inclined to quibble with this film’s title, because of course, Isaac was actually Abraham’s second son after Ishmael—but I must admit that God, when speaking to Abraham in Genesis 22:2, does call Isaac “your son, your only son”. Plus, of course, Ishmael had been expelled from Abraham’s camp by this point, so you can argue that Isaac was the only son who was still living with Abraham at that point. But still, I can’t dismiss Ishmael quite so easily—not after seeing the Arabic film The Promise—and I wonder what a film with this title will do with that part of the story, or whether it will even acknowledge that part of the story to begin with.
The IMDb indicates that God is being played by an actor, Daniel da Silva, who has already played Jesus in some short films directed by Helling—including a film about Adam & Eve in which da Silva’s character is identified as “God (Pre-Incarnate Christ)”. This suggests that the God we see in His Only Son will also be a pre-incarnate Christ, or what scholars sometimes refer to as a Christophany. Off the top of my head, the only other film I can think of that depicts the God of the Abraham story as a pre-incarnate Jesus is the 2013 miniseries The Bible.
The IMDb page for His Only Son indicates that some of the actors in it are playing Roman soldiers. I have no idea why. (Abraham lived over a thousand years before the Roman Empire came into being—some would say over two thousand!)
In the longer video above, Helling says the binding of Isaac—known in Jewish circles as the Akedah—is “one of the most controversial accounts in all scripture”, and he says this passage “has fueled much confusion or even contention toward God and his Word, and many believers are left without an answer for the scoffers.” He also says he makes films like this “to illustrate and exposit the biblical narrative” so that people can “hear the gospel” through these stories.
Based on the clip that appears in the video, it appears the Abraham of this film will espouse a form of specifically Protestant atonement theology known as penal substitution. The line about “bridging” the “chasm” between God’s holiness and humanity’s sinfulness is straight out of Bill Bright’s Four Spiritual Laws.
Angel Studios is calling His Only Son their “first theatrical movie”. The key words there are “theatrical” and “movie”. The Chosen has already put five episodes and a music special on the big screen, in three separate theatrical releases—but The Chosen is an episodic series, not a movie. And the studio already has films like Testament—but it’s only streaming those, it hasn’t put them in theatres.
The film’s intended release date, March 31, is two days before Palm Sunday on the Catholic and Protestant calendars, and nine days before Easter Sunday. I do not know if there are any plans for a DVD or streaming release beyond that.
You can see the film’s official website here.
Feb 12 update: Bethel McGrew commented on Twitter that the Roman soldiers might be part of “some sort of flash-forward to the crucifixion”—and as soon as I saw her tweet, it occurred to me that the actor who plays God might also be playing Jesus on the cross. I somehow hadn’t put two and two together quite like that yet.
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I have written quite a bit about Abraham movies over the years, including an essay on the genre for The Bible in Motion: A Handbook of the Bible and Its Reception in Film.
Last summer I wrote about The Promise, the third film in the ‘God’s Stories’ series of Arabic Bible movies, and I have written about other Abraham-themed movies like The Bible: In the Beginning… (dir. John Huston, 1966), Abraham (dir. Joseph Sargent, 1993), Year One (dir. Harold Ramis, 2009), and The Bible (dir. Crispin Reece, 2013).