Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Father’s Miracle’ on Netflix, a well-made but manipulative Mexican tearjerker

A Father’s Miracle (now on Netflix) has me wondering what the threshold for classification as a “faith-based” movie is. This Mexican drama exclusively refers to death as having “turned into an angel,” but two of the primary characters here are a very young girl and a man with a cognitive disability, so it’s hard to tell if that’s just the manner in which they speak. Do a couple of scenes set in a church and the use of a Virgin Mary statue as a prop push it over the edge? Possibly. The film’s at the very least faith-based-adjacent, and I came to that conclusion in the brief moments when it wasn’t trying extraordinarily hard to make us cry like other weepies. Which didn’t quite happen, mind you.

The Gist: Alma (Mariana Calderon) is the fastest kid in her class, despite her shoes. They’re clunky black leather things with the soles falling off. That’s all her family can afford. Her father Hector (Omar Chaparro) has an undisclosed mental disability. Her mother “turned into an angel.” Hector adores Alma. Would do anything for her, and all that. They live with Hector’s mother (Sofia Alvarez), who tends a big garden. Hector supports them by lugging a cart full of fruits and vegetables to town and selling them, and by helping out at the dog kennel. He’s a sweet, unassuming man, a softie who brings home old dogs nobody wants. He sneaks away to peek through the fence and watch little Alma torch her classmates in footraces. It’s a simple life.

Hector’s kindness extends to a mother and child being hassled by immigration enforcement officers who stalk the street with machine guns and ask people for their papers (note, the movie’s set in Mexico, so they apparently have to deal with this ICE-like horror too). He distracts the quasi-Gestapo and gives the woman and her son some food for free then quickly shuttles them to a hiding spot. Convoluted circumstances involving a pair of shiny new sneakers finds a little girl following them. She slips, falls a considerable distance to the ground and dies. She was the daughter of Capt. Aviles (Jorge A. Jiminez), a sternfaced military a-hole who railroads Hector for murder. Cops haul Hector in, beat him, coerce a confession and toss him in prison. So, inventory: Imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. Alma lost her mother and now maybe her father too. The only witness to the girl’s death is in the country illegally. It’s a complicated situation.

As Hector ends up in the general population despite his condition, the film becomes primarily a prison drama. He shares a cell with El Tigre (Gustavo Sanchez Parra), the most well-connected man in the prison, as well as Pedro (Biassini Segura), Tomas (Juan Pablo de Santiago) and Ivan (Arturo Rios). All Ivan does is stare at the ceiling, so he doesn’t participate in the welcoming committee by putting the guy who turns children into angels in the infirmary. Then El Tigre and the others wonder if in fact it’s true that Hector, who can’t defend himself and seemingly wouldn’t hurt a flea, is indeed innocent. While they befriend and protect Hector, Capt. Aviles orders Hector to be killed, clashing with the warden (Marco Trevino), whose motives are murky, perhaps because he’s about to retire and wants to avoid trouble, but most likely because he’s more plot cog than man. On the outside, Alma is denied visitation with her father. All she and Hector want is to be reunited. Will they overcome all this injustice and cruelty to make it happen? 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? There’s a bit of a cloying Life is Beautiful kind of thing happening here. And Chaparro’s performance is part I Am Sam, part Forrest Gump. 

Performance Worth Watching: Playing Alma’s teacher, Natalia Reyes gives a noticeably naturalistic performance in a movie that could use a few more such things.

Sex And Skin: None.

Our Take: The positives first: A Father’s Miracle is well-directed (by Ana Lorena Perez Rios), with a good eye for gritty detail in the set design and art direction. The performances show full commitment to character. The story flows smoothly, moves quickly and doesn’t overstay its welcome. And it fills the space between pure, unabashed innocence (Alma) and miserable evil (Aviles) with moral gradients (hardened convicts showing compassion and empathy), which lifts the film out of the Afterschool Special territory it frequently threatens to become.

Although those moral gradients turn stock archetypes into human beings with feelings, they also allow for obfuscation of motives belonging to those shades-of-gray characters, opening the door for the film to engage in dramatic misdirection. Which is to say, the movie manipulates us, shamelessly. Coincidence and misdirection are key elements of this sloppy plotting, and some developments exist solely for the purpose of salty tear extraction. For a movie that exerts considerable effort to be visually and texturally realistic, and that drops harsh modern political realities into the story to amplify the stakes, the screenplay is remarkably shoddy, shifting A Father’s Miracle from convincing to aggravating. Another draft or two and we might be having a different conversation right now. 

Our Call: Please don’t jerk me around like that. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.