The compliment is always the same. A director “doesn’t hit you over the head.” A studio “trusts the audience.” What they mean is that the film has learned the house rules of prestige: God may be implied, grief may be loud, and nobody in the first ten minutes should look like they have ever been to Wednesday Bible study.
There is a real craft argument inside the cliché. Bad faith films do lecture. They cue the needle-drop on the conversion. They cast the skeptic as a cartoon so the protagonist can win a debate nobody asked for. Escaping that trap is grown-up filmmaking. Pretending the trap is “any audible prayer” is something else.
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