Breakthrough

Except for some condensing of events into a shorter time frame, the faith-based film Breakthrough follows the real-life story that inspired it rather, um, faithfully. In January 2015, 14-year-old John Smith and two pals fell through the ice into a frigid lake in St. Charles, Missouri. The friends were rescued with few ill effects, while John spent 15 minutes under water and was pulled out without a pulse, his apparently lifeless body rushed to the hospital.

Roxann Dawson’s film is an inspirational, Christian-targeted one, so you know where it’s going. There will be prayers and a candlelight vigil. Doctors will issue grim pronouncements that parents will refuse to believe. A rescue worker will question his atheism. A miracle is inevitable.

And yet for all that, Breakthrough is a relatively straightforward movie with an A-minus-list cast presenting the story in a grounded, human context rather than as some kind of supernatural spectacle. In real life, John Noble — the wannabe hip evangelical preacher played by Topher Grace — reported a vision of angels in the boy’s hospital room, “putting his brain back together.” Wisely, the movie omits the angels and leaves it to the audience to draw their own conclusions.

Yes, there’s plenty of sincere, vocal praying and talk of God’s love and mercy, but that’s just who these people are, especially John Smith’s mom, Joyce (Chrissy Metz, NBC’s “This Is Us”). The screenplay, written by Grant Nieporte from Joyce’s ghost-written memoir, isn’t exactly warts and all, but it’s effective storytelling, presented in a visually routine package that’s consistent with Dawson’s extensive experience as an itinerant TV director.

Predictable as it may be, Breakthrough benefits from being released in the first spring in several years without an overearnest biblical adaptation and is primed to provide warm comfort to family audiences, people of faith and anyone exhausted by superheroes and supernatural horror.