PRECIOUS: BASED ON THE NOVEL ‘PUSH’ BY SAPPHIRE

This is a hard film to recommend and a hard film to dismiss. The true story of Precious Jones — raped by her father since childhood, abused by a mother who blames her for it — is told with real craft. The scripting is often superb, the drama and jeopardy genuine, and there's an attractive teacher whose patient instruction genuinely helps Precious survive and start to move up in the world.

But the cost of watching is steep. The abuse and rape scenes, and the conversations about them, are truly disturbing. The camera's fantasy sequences and handheld style sometimes illuminate the story and sometimes just distance you from it. And the ending offers only a small, incomplete victory — most viewers leave with lingering despair rather than triumph.

There's a fleeting, longing glimpse of Christianity here, but the film ultimately locates salvation in education and human compassion rather than God. If you go, go as an adult, prepared, and preferably at home, where you control the pause button and the aftermath conversation. This one is worth engaging with — just not worth walking into unprepared.

Sixteen-year-old Claireece "Precious" Jones is overweight, pregnant, and sullen — the product of a home where her father has raped her since she was three and her mother despises her for it. Expelled from school for being pregnant again, Precious is sent to an alternative program for girls in similar circumstances. There, a compassionate teacher, Ms. Rain, takes an interest in her and begins teaching her to write her story down, one day at a time — the first step toward a life Precious has never let herself imagine.

Three stars means this is genuinely strong filmmaking with real flaws. The scripting carries most of the weight — high drama, real jeopardy, and dialogue that earns its emotional force in most scenes, even if a few moments go flat and static. The music is well integrated into the story.

The visual choices are more uneven. Director Lee Daniels cuts frequently to Precious's fantasy sequences — imagining herself on a red carpet or courted by a handsome teacher — and while these sometimes deepen the pain of her real circumstances, at other times they intrude on the story rather than serve it. Much of the handheld camerawork has the same double effect: immediate, but occasionally distancing. It's a film that reaches for something ambitious and gets there more often than not.

Precious tells a true and terrible story, and it does so with a worldview worth naming plainly. The film's moral compass is what Movieguide calls "light" — genuine concern for a mother keeping her children, set inside an extremely immoral, dysfunctional home. There is one tender moment of positive Christian reference, as Precious gazes longingly at a church choir singing about salvation. But the film never lets her walk through that door. Instead, it locates her rescue in a lesbian teacher's compassion and instruction — real human kindness, but framed as sufficient on its own. The film's undercurrent goes further still, suggesting people are, at bottom, simply animals driven by animal desires. That is a diminished view of the image-bearing creatures God made us to be.

What the film gets right, it gets right forcefully: the horror of abuse should horrify us, and Precious's hunger for a better life is worth honoring. But a story about rescue that never looks past human effort to the God who "heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds" (Psalm 147:3) leaves its heroine — and its audience — one step short of the real answer. Scripture names exactly the wound this film depicts and offers exactly the comfort it withholds: "For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the LORD will take me in" (Psalm 27:10).

Precious tells a true and harrowing story with real skill, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than avoided out of squeamishness alone. But between the graphic abuse, the heavy profanity, and a worldview that quietly swaps faith in God for faith in human effort, this isn't a film to walk into casually. Our answer: wait for home — adults only. Looking for something gentler for the whole family this week? Start here:.