Working in cinema verité style, experimental filmmaker Jake Mahaffy has fashioned his part social critique and documentary-like narrative based on a true story about a faith healing gone bad. He employs only two professional actors, Edwina Findley and David Harewood, and the rest are culled mainly from the ranks of a Memphis Pentecostal church, where most of the action takes place.
Findlay does well in the main part as Melva, the harried mother of an autistic child, Benny, very convincingly played by newcomer, RaJay Chandler. Melva doesn't know what to do with Benny, who is the prototypical infant terrible, constantly screaming and banging his head against the wall.
Mahaffy does well in what turns out to be a welcome social critique for the first half of his narrative. It's the psychiatric profession that mainly comes under fire here along with an indifferent social services bureaucracy that forces people like Melva, as a last resort, to seek help from a cult-like religious institution such as the Pentecostal church depicted here.
The bottom line is that the modern day healers, with their psychotropic drugs that do more harm than good, provide few answers for harried mothers such as Melva, pretending that they offer solutions to parents of autistic children, when they clearly do not.
Mahaffy is on less solid ground in his depiction of the faith healers. The place is run by the main healer, Mother (played by the real-life Prophetess Libra who runs the Pentecostal church), along with Bishop (blues guitarist Preston Shannon), Harewood's Abe is the one they rely on to do the actual faith healings as he's already supposedly cured someone of cancer and has a reputation of someone always volunteering to be saved at the onset of each service.
Mother's panacea consists mainly of clearing Melva's apartment of evil influences including Halloween decorations and that's about the extent we learn about the church-goers' mindset. Abe, far less communicative, is all fire and brimstone, and gets a little too physical with Benny during the exorcism, which leads to the tragedy of the boy's death.
Mahaffy doesn't really know how to build suspense so he's content to depict real services in the church one after another, imparting to the entire piece a rather lugubrious and repetitious feel. His characters too do not really appear to be fleshed out (i.e. developed) except for the aforementioned Melva, as her story turns out to be the most compelling.
Despite winning the Horizons section at the Venice film Festival, Free in Deed, is a minor work, which might have worked better as a documentary than a low-budget feature.
Findlay does well in the main part as Melva, the harried mother of an autistic child, Benny, very convincingly played by newcomer, RaJay Chandler. Melva doesn't know what to do with Benny, who is the prototypical infant terrible, constantly screaming and banging his head against the wall.
Mahaffy does well in what turns out to be a welcome social critique for the first half of his narrative. It's the psychiatric profession that mainly comes under fire here along with an indifferent social services bureaucracy that forces people like Melva, as a last resort, to seek help from a cult-like religious institution such as the Pentecostal church depicted here.
The bottom line is that the modern day healers, with their psychotropic drugs that do more harm than good, provide few answers for harried mothers such as Melva, pretending that they offer solutions to parents of autistic children, when they clearly do not.
Mahaffy is on less solid ground in his depiction of the faith healers. The place is run by the main healer, Mother (played by the real-life Prophetess Libra who runs the Pentecostal church), along with Bishop (blues guitarist Preston Shannon), Harewood's Abe is the one they rely on to do the actual faith healings as he's already supposedly cured someone of cancer and has a reputation of someone always volunteering to be saved at the onset of each service.
Mother's panacea consists mainly of clearing Melva's apartment of evil influences including Halloween decorations and that's about the extent we learn about the church-goers' mindset. Abe, far less communicative, is all fire and brimstone, and gets a little too physical with Benny during the exorcism, which leads to the tragedy of the boy's death.
Mahaffy doesn't really know how to build suspense so he's content to depict real services in the church one after another, imparting to the entire piece a rather lugubrious and repetitious feel. His characters too do not really appear to be fleshed out (i.e. developed) except for the aforementioned Melva, as her story turns out to be the most compelling.
Despite winning the Horizons section at the Venice film Festival, Free in Deed, is a minor work, which might have worked better as a documentary than a low-budget feature.