Sundance 2022: Honk For Jesus Save Your Soul Review

This will be one of many reviews during this year’s Sundance Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.

The world of Mega Church religion is a crazy place led by big people with big personalities who use showmanship to attract legions of worshippers. That being said, these churches have attracted just as much criticism and rightfully so, swindling millions of dollars from worshippers, taking advantage of them at their most vulnerable, as pastors have merely lined their pockets, using those earnings to live extravagantly. This behavior for the most part has gone unchecked even though most are more or less aware of these practices. Honk For Jesus Save Your Soul is a comedy that satirizes this subculture, featuring the dynamite pairing of Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown as a couple at the head of a Southern MegaChurch. While the pairing certainly delivers here, the film itself seemingly suffered from an identity crisis. Finding itself in the middle, it was a shallow character study and/or a shallow satire of the Mega Church. Either way, Hall and Brown still make it well worth the ride but one can’t help but want more.

Honk For Jesus Save Your Soul, as mentioned, follows Trinity (Hall) and Lee-Curtis Childs (Brown) as the couple look to recover from a recent scandal and rebuild their congregation. Set up as a pseudo-mockumentary documenting the Childs comeback, the film follows the couple as they attempt to recover their image while finding their place back in their community where others have thrived as a result of their downfall. They were no longer the only game in town anymore. Through the lens of the Childs attempted comeback and the surrounding landscape, the film found its satire where the comedy on paper is the sheer ridiculousness of it, personalities and all. Though that did have its moments, the more compelling part of the film was that comeback aspect. Watching the scandal cloud loom over them have an impact on that process, especially over the husband and wife dynamic made for some powerful moments. That inner conflict within Trinity in particular as she balanced those feelings in the midst of doing right by her husband who she still loved and helping her community for whom she believed she and her church were helping in spite of its issues. In the end, something had to give.

At the end of the day, in spite of the film’s shallowness, the best part of Honk For Jesus Save Your Soul was the aforementioned great performances from Hall and Brown and their dynamite chemistry as Trinity and Lee-Curtis Childs respectively with Hall being the standout. Hall was essentially the heart of the film, carrying the emotional weight of that internal conflict that held Trinity back. Her arc over the course of the film was a truly powerful one to watch. Brown brought energy and a touch of camp as the showman pastor who was yet still a flawed man behind the scenes.

Overall, Honk For Jesus Save Your Soul may not be the deep satire it was made out to be but it is certainly entertaining.

*still courtesy of Sundance

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Keith Noakes

The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.