A harrowing exploration of faith under pressure, Free in Deed is the latest addition to our Best of the 2010s film series

Jake Mahaffy’s films tend to begin with characters reaching certain imaginative, and often spiritual, threshold points. In Wellness (2008), a newly hired salesman working for a non-existent business (a pyramid scheme built around some vaguely defined health care system) has to, more or less, invent his job on the fly while trying to sell an imaginary product. He throws himself wholeheartedly into his new venture, even as he fails miserably and all signs point to the unreality of his profession. In 2020’s Reunion, a pregnant woman returns to her childhood home and is surprised to find her domineering mother there as well. Her stay dredges up repressed and forcefully imposed memories with cathartic and brutal results. These characters have rooted their understanding of the world in something beyond themselves. Mahaffy charts how their beliefs have shaped their realities as they are forced to deal with potentially devastating consequences for their faithfulness.

Related: Investing Everything: Jake Mahaffy’s Wellness (2008) by Brett Wright

Free in Deed (2015) follows various members of a storefront church in Memphis. One is Abe Wilkins (David Harewood), a man who is featured in sermons as a faith healer. During services, he works miracles. Outside the church, his life is in shambles. He barely makes a living and clearly has his share of demons. He prays to God begging for any kind of sign that he cares and is met with racial profiling by police officers on his walks home from work and demoralizing cleanup jobs as a school janitor. But then Abe becomes involved with Melva Neddy (Edwina Findley), a young, single mother of two. Her oldest, a boy named Benny (RaJay Chandler), suffers from an undiagnosed illness that causes him to scream and lash out violently while covering his ears. She has taken him to doctor after doctor and been carelessly sent away with drugs. His elementary school teacher has to tie him up in yoga mats to avoid being attacked in class, and Melva’s boss is entirely unsympathetic to her struggles. After being introduced by a fellow congregation member, Abe begins leading after-hours healing sessions with the boy in their church. Throughout the course of trying to heal Benny, Abe and Melva grow closer, until a session goes horribly wrong.

Free in Deed is a film of great restraint. Mahaffy has stated that he modeled the film after the Blues, and he avoids overplaying this story that could have easily been sensationalized and made more melodramatic and comfortable for audiences to digest. The film is about faith being followed to the limits of believability, but so much of the emotional turbulence of Free in Deed is held in. In a recent interview with the filmmaker, Mahaffy said the film didn’t come together until the editing stage. When he assembled the footage after wrapping production, he was horrified to find the film resembled a “bad TV movie.” It wasn’t until he started tearing the film apart in order to reassess what he had in the footage. He threw story and continuity to the wind and started building the film according to the emotions within each scene. The narrative would be reintroduced — reverse engineered, in a sense.

What came out of this reworking process is a raw exploration of aspects of spirituality and belief that traditional narratives can rarely grasp at. Free in Deed became a film where faith and uncertainty clash within each and every blink and breath of its characters. Mahaffy recognizes the defenses Abe and Melva have put up against the world and the coldness it continuously throws at them. Their lives outside the church give them little reason to believe in miracles, especially Melva, who has lost her job, receives no help from the health care system, and has no idea what to do for her son. In each other though, within their shared belief system, Abe and Melva begin to establish some form of grounding.

Whether or not you believe in the religious aspects relating to faith healing, the film’s treatment of the communal experience of worship is entirely respectful while recognizing a certain theatricality in the services. Free in Deed isn’t interested in taking the cheap shots at organized religion that so many modern films tend to. Mahaffy appears to be most interested in the complicated idea of performing a miracle. The services take place in a space where the expression of heightened emotions is encouraged for all present. But there are moments when even the leader of the congregation calls Abe’s rituals into question. During every service, the faith healer makes a routine of approaching the altar for forgiveness. “It’s embarrassing,” he tells Abe as they clean up their worship space. Of course, he will change his tune by the end of the film and urge Abe to the front of the room when he needs the stability of ritual most. The film’s final shot stands as one of modern cinema’s most visceral expressions of spiritual grasping and need. There are no grandiose displays of acting in Free in Deed, especially from Harwood in this particular moment. But Mahaffy and his actor strike a resounding chord, sounding a deep, growling utterance of distress as it forces its way to Abe’s surface.

Mahaffy says he is interested in “subjective realism,” as in, he is not attempting to replicate some objective “reality” on screen, but rather explore how his characters create their own realities, which are often at odds with or challenged by what’s presented to them. As Abe and Melva proceed with their healing sessions for Benny, Mahaffy asks the most difficult and compassionate questions an artist can raise about faith and how it can survive, guide, and blind his characters through such devastation and uncertainty. He follows them in their struggles without shying away from the hardship and recognizes the power that lies within his characters during these most trying of times — the power that may appear useless in the face of such cruelty presented by an uncaring world, but a power that is forever a potential and ready to be believed in.

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