It was theatrically released by Universal Pictures on January 21, 2022, and received generally negative reviews from critics.

[2] During the California Gold Rush, a beautiful young woman called Angel works as a prostitute in the fictional town of Pair-a-Dice.

Alex eventually cuts off support for Mae, forcing her to sell her possessions and jewelry for money.

The jeweler, John, persuaded her to sleep with him, and without any choice, Mae resorts to prostitution and work to support herself and Sarah.

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.

Angel arrives in California with hopes of beginning a new life but is robbed by two women and now penniless, once again becomes a prostitute at a brothel there.

In the 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.

As the two begin their life on the farm, Angel develops feelings for Michael but runs away again when she realizes that he wants children, as she believes herself to be sterile due to Duke forcing her to get an abortion without her consent when she had previously worked for him.

She finds from a town local that the brothel had been burned down by Macgowan with the Duchess, Lucky and Mei Ling inside, leading to MacGowen being hunted down by an angry mob and killed.

As Angel falls in love with Michael, she becomes convinced that he will be happier married to someone else who can have children, leading her to leave him once more.

The following morning, Angel encounters Duke, who has relocated to California and reveals he was the one who ordered the hotel to be burnt down after hearing she was working there through his men.

But seeing how Duke has continued to harbor young girls into his work, just like her, Angel confronts her boss only to be silenced with a death threat.

There, in a moment of desperation, she regains the faith she lost after her mother's death and tells the audience about Duke's sexual trafficking of young girls.

[19] Mike McCahill of The Guardian gave the film 2/5 stars, saying it "thinly scatters a parable's worth of plot across 134 minutes and resembles HBO's Deadwood recut for Sunday-school purposes: pious, puzzling and punitive, with a sternly wagging finger never far from entering the frame.

"[20] RogerEbert.com's Nell Minow gave it 2/4 stars, writing, "The biggest problem is that the most touching moments are hammered so hard.

A. Dowd criticized the love story as "icky", saying it "hinges on a fundamental power imbalance: Angel literally can't say no to Michael's evening visits... and when she finally does accept his proposal, it's while lying bruised and battered after one of her employer's thugs beats her within an inch of her life."