I’ve seen a lot of movies, but some of them confuse me as to the points they are trying to make. Or I just don’t get them. Sometimes it’s because they are too convoluted or specious for their own good; sometimes it’s because I just can’t keep up, or I suspect hidden motives behind their facades. I have to confess that Infidel seems to be one of those movies.

Cyrus Nowrasteh’s film, inspired by true events, finds a religious American journalist (Jim Caviezel) kidnapped by Islamists after he travels to Cairo and preaches Christianity. The rest of the film follows the devotion of his wife (Claudia Karvan) as she travels to Iran to try to pressure the government to release him, and the help she receives from cloaked sources. It is an action film, taut with suspense, filled with drama and deception, with just enough of a religious subtext to make me question it all.

Jim Caviezel is a religious guy, who just happened to play Jesus Christ in The Passion of the Christ in 2004. He was beaten to a pulp in that movie, and he is again beaten to a pulp in this movie. He’s also a fine actor, who does a nice job in this drama. But his character goes to the Middle East to bring people together spiritually — a noble notion — and his proselytizing leads directly to his kidnapping. And the rest of the story is about as anti-Islamic as one would imagine, as the American is beaten and the Iranian government continually lies about it and even kills some of its own people in the process of keeping him captive. Is this anti-Islam propaganda? Yes — even though it has a firm foundation of realism.

It has one thing in it’s favor in my view — Cyrus Nowrasteh has quite a strong resumé as a political and social-cause writer and director, and he knows the milieu of which he writes (he’s an American of Iranian descent). The dramatic and action scenes are pretty solid, if a bit by-the-numbers, so it works pretty well as a thriller. Ultimately, though, I’m just not sure what I am supposed to be getting out of this movie. All I know for sure is that it is a bad idea for Americans, especially Christians, to flaunt their beliefs in a region of the world that rejects them. The political questions that are raised by the man’s kidnapping are not just cogent, but really unanswerable. Such ambiguity is admirable, but also not very satisfying. My rating: ☆ ☆ 1/2. 19 October 2020.