Redeeming Love (2022)

During the 1850s, a beautiful young woman named Angel works as a prostitute in the fictional California town of Pair-a-Dice. Despite being the object of desire for the local men, she survives through hatred and self-loathing. Meanwhile, a visiting farmer named Michael Hosea prays to God and asks for help finding a wife. Later that day, he sees Angel walking through town and feels prompted by God to marry her. Flashbacks reveal that Angel’s real name is Sarah and that she knows only rejection from men. As a child, she overhears her father, Alex Stafford, say that she should never have been born. Sarah learns that her father is married and her mother, Mae, is his mistress. Alex eventually cuts off support for Mae, leading her to become a prostitute and eventually become sick and die. Distraught, Sarah rejects her mother’s Catholic faith. Afterwards, Mae’s pimp sells an 8-year-old Sarah to a man named Duke, who renames her “Angel” and forces her into prostitution.

One night, when Angel is a teenager, one of her customers is her father, and she knowingly has sex with him to punish him for how he treated her mother. He does not recognize her, but when he finds out the next morning, he commits suicide. This prompts Angel to successfully escape from Duke. She arrives in California with hopes of beginning a new life but, penniless, once again becomes a prostitute at a brothel there. In present day, when Michael enters Angel’s room and tells her he wants to marry her, she is thrown off guard, but remains aloof toward him. After she is nearly beaten to death by a brothel guard, she agrees to marry Michael and leave with him as he nurses her back to health. Michael continues to surprise her as he claims to love her as his wife, and refuses to have sex with her. Afraid to trust him, she runs away at her first opportunity, but Michael finds her and convinces her to come home.