Entertainment
This Underappreciated Mockumentary With a ‘One Battle After Another’ Star Is Now Streaming on Netflix
Something nice is happening right now. People are remembering that Regina Hall is talented. Like, can do it all, laugh-out-loud comedy and Oscar-nominated dramatics, talented. If you’re one of those people and One Battle After Another is what finally made it click for you, that’s genuinely fine – better late than never is a real thing. But if we’re talking bandwagon acrobatics, may we direct you to one of the actor’s most underrated catalog entries, Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.?
It’s got everything you could want from a sharp, religious satire dressed up as a mockumentary. A Southern Baptist megachurch. A sexual misconduct scandal. An extremely ill-advised documentary about the comeback attempt. Sterling K. Brown playing an egotistical preacher who absolutely believes his own press. Hall as Trinitie, his First Lady – put together, loyal, desperate to clean up her husband’s very large mess. It’s on Netflix. It’s been waiting patiently. Here’s your sign to hit play.
A Megachurch Mockumentary That’s All Kinds of Awkward
Honk for Jesus is technically a mockumentary, which means there’s a documentary crew following around a very public couple during a very public image rehab campaign. The couple in question: Trinitie and Lee-Curtis Childs, once the glamorous leaders of a Southern Baptist megachurch that has recently been rocked by scandal. Attendance has plummeted. The vibes are undoubtedly off. And yet, the closet full of designer suits stays color-coordinated.
Brown plays Lee-Curtis as a charming, slippery snake-oil salesman who’s absolutely certain this is all temporary. He’s puffed up with just the right amount of charisma and animal magnetism to make the theory that his lavish lifestyle is, in fact, funded by the donation plate plausible. (Who wouldn’t tithe it all away for those pearly whites?) While he’s hamming it up for the camera, Hall’s got a harder job. Trinitie is in a midlife crisis of her own as a woman figuring out who she is when the thing she built her identity around starts falling apart. And director Adamma Ebo indulges in the artifice of it all, making the most of his chosen format to mine every bit of cringe she can from confessionals gone sideways and hot-mic pick-ups and long-lens shots that make the audience feel like peeping toms. It’s sharp without being preachy, awkward, uncomfortable, and very, very funny.
Regina Hall: Saved, Sanctified, Slightly Spiraling
But let’s talk about Hall, because this is really her movie.
Trinitie stays dressed like the congregation might repopulate at any second. Her hair is immaculate, her tailoring aggressive. She sweeps through echoing hallways with full Sunday-morning confidence as Hall gives her a hyper-specific precision that makes you think every smile and wave has been workshopped a dozen times already. What’s so fun to watch is how Trinitie performs for the camera while clearly having an entirely separate internal monologue. She’ll deliver a gracious, holier-than-thou soundbite about forgiveness, then flick her eyes toward the documentary crew like she’s begging for a life raft to be thrown. It’s a comedy performance built on micro-expressions and Hall sells it all so effortlessly that you start paying more attention to her pauses than the bigger punchlines.
Opposite her, Brown gives Lee-Curtis the kind of glossy sheen that explains how he raised this megachurch in the first place. He is very committed to the idea that this is all just a temporary setback, enough so that he strips to his skivvies to be baptized and born again, displays his Prada suits for the camera, and compares his comeback to that of another born brawler – Rocky Balboa (but the second movie, y’all).
Of ‘One Battle After Another’s Supporting Characters, This Performance Deserved More Credit
A striking performance of few words.
The dynamic between him and Hall is where the movie really hums. They have the chemistry of two people who have spent years presenting a united front. When they argue, it’s not a dramatic showdown, but a PR meeting that’s two seconds away from going off the rails. Brown’s Lee-Curtis is delusionally confident and frustratingly dismissive of the real-world consequences of his actions, while his wife, Hall’s Trinitie, is masking sheer panic and suffocating misery behind a brittle smile that only falters when she thinks the camera’s not trained on her.
The movie is smart enough not to turn her into a saint. Trinitie has enjoyed the perks of this empire. She likes the big house. She likes the clothes. She likes being First Lady. And Hall never pretends otherwise, which makes the performance sharper and more human. You can see her weighing loyalty against self-preservation in every interaction, calculating what she can afford to lose and what she refuses to give up because of her husband’s indiscretions.
‘Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul’ Is a Hilarious Comedy Worth a Watching
If you are worried this is going to be two hours of easy megachurch jokes, it’s not. The humor is more observational than slapstick, and that’s mostly because the mockumentary format lets the awkwardness breathe. There are long pauses. There are straight-to-cameras that start confident and end slightly off-balance, and moments when you can tell a character is saying one thing and thinking another.
Hall thrives in that gray area. She has always been good at comedy that has a little bite to it, and here she layers that skill with something more vulnerable. A joke will land, and then half a second later, you realize there is something sad underneath it. If anything, this film serves as proof that Hall has never had to choose between comedy and drama. She’s been blending them for years. She just needed a character big enough and complicated enough to show off her full range.
Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul may not have dominated the discourse when it first came out, but it has aged into a very satisfying watch. It is sharp about public image and private compromise without turning into a lecture. It gives Sterling K. Brown room to be charming and maddening at the same time. But most importantly, it gives Regina Hall a character who is funny, proud, anxious, controlled, and slowly fraying around the edges. If you are in the mood for something that will make you laugh and then immediately rethink why you’re laughing, this is it. And if you are newly obsessed with Hall’s ability to do absolutely everything, this will only deepen the fixation.
Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. is now streaming on Netflix in the U.S.
- Release Date
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September 2, 2022
- Runtime
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103 minutes
- Director
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Adamma Ebo
- Writers
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Adamma Ebo
- Producers
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Regina Hall, Sterling K. Brown, Daniel Kaluuya, Rowan Riley, Gerry Pass, Adanne Ebo, Amandla Crichlow, Kara Durrett, Jessamine Burgum, Matthew R. Cooper, Adamma Ebo