Mormon film

Mormon film is a film genre notable for it's use of string-heavy orchestration combined with a calm, reflective male voiceover put through a strong reverb effect. Purists maintain that every true Mormon film opens in this way. Some Mormon films also contain a female voiceover, but never without the male voiceover.

The string-heavy scores are, perhaps, demanded by the subject matter of some films, but in others they can feel like an odd choice when so many other choices are available, such as for instance you might expect at least some Mormon films to open with a track by the Osmonds, the Killers or Imagine Dragons sometime, cause they're Mormon, but that never happens.

Visually, Mormon films tend to feature white people, nature and white people in nature. This convention is not as universally adhered to as the scoring and audio effects, but it is nearly so, and it holds true even in Book of Mormon films where the peoples being depicted clearly could not have been of European descent.

Writing quality of Mormon films varies in direct proportion to whether Orson Scott Card worked on the project or not. With Mormon films that do hire Card, the writing tends to be competent, while without Card, the writing is almost always laughably cheesy and cringeworthy. Earlier in Card's career, a few films he worked on were still cheesy despite his involvement, but in general, this rule holds true.

You can always tell when a film comes out of BYU by these clear signs.