Mel Gibson’s inspiration becomes a movie.

The Passion of the Christ has inspired all sorts of cinematic spin-offs and follow-ups: documentaries such as Sister Rose’s Passion and The Big Question, would-be sequels such as The Final Inquiry, hopeful imitators such as The Nativity Story, sort-of remakes such as the BBC’s The Passion, re-issues of older movies such as Monty Python’s Life of Brian, and so forth, and so on.

So, do you think there’s any chance Mel Gibson’s film, which was based in part on the visions of Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich, inspired this other new movie? It’s based on a novel that came out two years ago, and for all I know the novel may have been in the works when Gibson was still making his film, but certainly the success of Gibson’s film must have made the subject matter more appealing to whoever ended up financing this movie.

At any rate, here’s what Eddie Cockrell of Variety has to say about it:

A double-edged 1970s vibe permeates “The Pledge,” a dramatization of a real-life 1818 rural encounter between a stigmatic nun and the devout writer sent to document her beliefs in a book that eventually became the inspiration for Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” That footnote may gain the pic fest invites, with smallscreen sales and faith-driven ancillary to follow.

“Reformed libertines are usually boring,” someone observes of philistine-turned-devout-Catholic Clemens Brentano (Misel Maticevic). Poet has been dispatched to westernmost Germany to transcribe ecstatic visions of Christ’s life by Anna Katharina Emmerich, who refers to him as “Pilgrim.” Their encounter proves tempestuous. Stilted delivery style may have been deliberate on the part of helmer Dominik Graf, but the strategy wears thin over time. Tech package is more successfully evocative of 1970s stylistic flourishes, from lenser Michael Wiesweg’s slow zooms to the weird electronic score by Sven Rossenbach and Florian van Volxem, half of experimental band “Victory of the Better Man.” Pic was shot entirely in the North Rhine-Westphalia region. (Berlin fest documentation lists the title as “The Vow,” though “The Pledge” is what appears on the print).

Given that so, so much of the controversy over The Passion was devoted to the anti-Semitism that Gibson supposedly inherited from Emmerich, it will be interesting to see if this film deals with that in any way. (For what it’s worth, as Mark Goodacre has noted, Gibson actually turns some of Emmerich’s anti-Semitism on its head, notably in his portrayal of Simon of Cyrene; in Emmerich’s visions, Simon is a pagan who is offended by how the Jewish Pharisees are treating Jesus, but in Gibson’s film, Simon is a Jew who is offended by how the pagan Romans are treating Jesus.)

I am also curious to see whether this film visualizes any of Emmerich’s visions as Brentano is transcribing them, and thus whether this film dramatizes some of the very same episodes that Gibson has already committed to celluloid. If so, then, at a minimum, we can add this film to that long list of films that have portrayed episodes from the life of Jesus; and who knows, it might be interesting to see how this film’s interpretation of those episodes resembles or deviates from Gibson’s interpretation.