[6] Richard Abel notes that the principal distinction of the film is "its unique combination of realist and melodramatic elements", what he calls its "masculine" and "feminine" discourse.
As example of the first characteristic, he mentions "the deliberate effort to achieve some measure of verisimilitude - through both shooting on location and using authentic props", while the second one results from the fact that the film "repeatedly insists on privileging women in relation to Jesus".
She notes in particular that "The attendance of a large group of women around the foot of the cross implies their faithfulness in contrast to the male disciples' absence and lack of fidelity."
She also appreciates the effective use of the dissolve technique, notably in scene 8, The Last Supper, to show how a terrified Judas has a vision of Jesus "half-naked (...) wearing a crown of thorns, holding a red scepter, and (bearing) the marks of crucifixion" with three angels behind him.
[7] Gwendolyn Audrey Foster considers this film one of Guy's major accomplishments, "an ambitious spectacle that used lavish budgets, large crews, and hundred of extras".
Guy "skillfully managed to incorporate scores of extras to give added depth to her work, the same way that (...) D.W. Griffith did a decade later in Birth of a Nation and Intolerance."
For her, the film highlights Guy's "role in the development of a hybrid cinema that questions notions of 'realism' and 'artifice' in gendered performativity".
She finds that Guy took "a slightly feminist, though dominantly white and racist perspective" blending "spectacle and realism in an unprecedented manner.
(...) the extreme stylisation of her vision (...) effectively creates an alternative universe in which the protagonists (...) seem enshrined by each of the carefully framed compositions."