The Stoning of Soraya M. puts on a good face—it seems to be a morality tale about misogyny and religious extremism and the deadliness of inaction. And a lot of people will probably like it. Those people are mostly wrong.

"Based on a true story," the preface crows, the film is about a woman (eponymous) from a small village in Iran, who is framed for adultery by her husband then stoned to death in the town square. A French journalist (Jim Caviezel, no stranger to, uh, Abrahamically brutal cinema) becomes stranded in the town a few weeks after the stoning and receives the story—in hushed tones that melt into flashbacks—from Soraya's aunt, one of those feisty, prerevolutionary intellectuals now veiled but not cowed.

Death by stoning, of course, is a thing that happens in the world—a true story, if you want—but Soraya M. paints the circumstance with such a broad brush that it tells no truth at all. Soraya's husband is nothing but a monster: a violent, bearded terror who'd like nothing more than to publicly murder his wife so he can marry a child (the other men of the town are either corrupt or retarded). Oh, the world's most evil cartoon man is pro-stoning? You don't say. That's not truth—it's boring racism.

Now, I'm not sure if you know what it looks like when someone is stoned to death, but this movie will inform you: First they tie your hands behind your back. Then they bury you in the ground up to your waist. Then everyone you know (your dad, your kids, your husband, the mayor) throws rocks at your head until you are dead. The stoning scene is long, detailed, bloody, and unforgiving, recalling nothing so directly as The Passion of the Christ. And it'd be no surprise if the same Christian extremists who evangelized Passion attach to this one just as fiercely: It demonizes an entire religious group while purporting a message of equality. Gross.