Brave the Dark 2025 Movie Review
It’s hard to find movies with a redemptive message. It’s even harder to find ones that are well made and tell real-life stories. Some of the best ones in history, like The Shawshank Redemption (1994), feature an amazing cast, great cinematography, and a compelling story—with some cheap shots directed at Christians—but they’re fiction, not fact.
Enter Brave the Dark, a new release from Angel Studios, coming to theaters in late January. It tells the story of Stan Deen (1937-2016), a popular English teacher/theater director at Garden Spot High School in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. One day Deen spots a troubled youth, Nate, shaking a vending machine. When Nate arrives to class, Deen gives him a candy bar, figuring he was hungry.
It turns out Nate hasn’t eaten in days. He is homeless, living out of his car, having been in and out of foster homes since leaving his grandparents’ custody years earlier. We later learn that the grandparents were poor caretakers, contributing to Nate’s trauma as a young child in ways I can’t reveal without spoiling the plot.
Deen takes Nate under his wing at great personal cost. Nate has fallen in with the wrong crowd at school and soon gets in trouble with the law — winding up behind bars, unable to post bail, even refusing the customary phone call the police offer. Concerned, Deen eventually shows up at the jailhouse to inquire. The grandparents are contacted and Nate briefly returns to live with them before moving in with Deen so he can finish high school. Deen’s colleagues ridicule him school for this risky decision.
Throughout the film, we’re given bits and pieces of what happened to Nate’s mother and father until all is revealed at the end. That’s clearly by design, and the filmmakers execute it to brilliant effect. The entire movie revolves around Deen’s attempts to reform Nate by helping him confront the demons in his past.
Deen is a relentless optimist who always sees the good in others. He’s the kind of teacher students love. He also knows everyone in their small town because he’s lived there so long and most of the residents were once students.
If Stan Deen is naïve early on, that’s soon corrected when he learns how difficult it is to help Nate. At times Nate doesn’t even want to help himself. A troubled teen who has never experienced unconditional love and acceptance (apart from his mother), he is suspicious of the adults around him; in his experience, they only want something in return. But Deen loves Nate simply because he chooses to, and that rocks and reforms Nate’s entire orientation in life in ways that reminded me of the priest in Les Misérables who gives Jean Valjean his expensive silver cutlery and candlesticks.
But Brave the Dark is not a preachy film. We see Deen praying in the hospital as Nate is fighting for his life. The phrase “pearls before swine” is used when Deen is angrily confronting Nate. But the real-life Stan Deen, according to his obituary, was a dedicated Christian, even serving at times as a youth minister for various churches. From what we’re shown, it seems he never married. His fellow teachers and students, especially those in theater, became his family. (Dean involves Nate in the school’s theatrical production when he learns of his passion for photography.)
Brave the Dark carries a PG-13 rating for language and a few brief scenes of teens kissing and partying. It’s a fair rating, and I would not recommend the film for younger children. There’s a violent moment toward the end that’s not for the faint of heart. It’s not gratuitous, though, and it’s actually an important part of the story’s resolution, as we come to better understand the dark forces with which Nate is battling.
I doubt you’ll be able to fight back tears as the movie ends. (My wife and I couldn’t.) An important theme in Brave the Dark is that we must face our problems and our past, however dark they may be — not run from them. The movie also sheds considerable light on the trauma many children in the foster system experience.
