Faith and undercover police work make an unlikely duo, but writer-director Ralph Cinque teams them up in In God’s Hands. A crime story where your badge and your heart are inseparable.
Detective Tyrell Banks (Claude Xavier) is still picking up the pieces, raising his 17-year-old daughter, Kayla (Sophia Colwell), after the death of his beloved wife, Mariela. Work at the San Marcos Police Department keeps his mind off his personal struggles. Seeing his detective needs a kick in the pants, Chief Jess Burry (Mike Nettles) has a big assignment waiting for him — one that comes with a wife.
The department is after a criminal ring that steals children and sells them to childless couples as adoptions. The plan is for Tyrell to pose with Detective Zolana Reed (Joy White) as a married couple looking to adopt. The undercover operation puts them in direct contact with Logan Hartman (Michael Edenbaum), who takes them across the border into Mexico, where the ring works with makeshift orphanages. There, they meet a young boy named Subby (Benjamin Grant Barnes), whom they first saw in a video. As they get deeper into the crime ring, they are constantly reminded of what happens if they blow their cover.
Then the fake marriage starts feeling a little less fake. Tyrell catches himself having feelings for Zolana, and it eats at him because his heart still belongs to Mariela. He’s a man of faith, and this feels like a betrayal. Now Tyrell has to figure out what God wants for him without letting the mission—and the children—fall apart.
“The department is after a criminal ring that steals children and sells them to childless couples as adoptions.”
In God’s Hands is the little indie film that could. Right from the opening minutes, you know you’re watching an ultra-micro-low-budget DIY movie with the desire to be something bigger than what it is. It has the ambition of a studio thriller: undercover cops, child-trafficking rings, multinational intrigue. It just needed a few million dollars more than it actually had to look a million times more cinematic.
Clearly, the biggest weakness is the budget. Everything is done on the cheap. If you’ve been following Film Threat, you know that you have a camera in your pocket, so there’s no excuse to not make your movie. The production moves quickly from one scene to the next — getting the work done and moving on. There’s no hired cinematographer composing each shot to make things look like a movie meant for the big screen. That said, I have to give credit to some pretty cool interior car shots — projection screens sell the illusion that the car is actually moving, and it works.
But here’s the thing: this movie has heart. It wants to spotlight the very real problem of illegal adoptions happening in Texas and across the border in Mexico. It goes hard on showing kids as innocent victims in a much bigger money scheme. It also does something we don’t see much in movies nowadays — it injects romance into the story. Finding love after grieving. Opening yourself up to what God has in store for you. At its core, this is a story about love and family: a fake couple who draw closer on the job until they want to adopt the very children they’re trying to rescue.
Bottom line, In God’s Hands was made on the cheap, but it has heart, and it’s worth supporting.
For screening information, visit the In God’s Hands official website.