“Sound of Freedom” doesn’t depict anything close to QAnon conspiracy fantasies, which have been linked to incidents of extremism and violence including the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The film’s villains are common criminals, not the shadowy cabal of occultists imagined by QAnoners.

But the movie has nevertheless been promoted on QAnon message boards, and some accuse it of playing into the movement, which is based on the false belief that a highly organized network of global elites are kidnapping children, having sex with them and harvesting their blood.

That’s partially because Ballard and the actor who plays him, Caviezel, have both expressed support for some of the QAnon’s movement’s wildest claims.

Ballard once entertained a viral theory that claimed the online furniture retailer Wayfair was selling children, sometimes packing them into overpriced storage cabinets. “Law enforcement’s going to flush that out and we’ll get our answers sooner than later,” he said in a July 2020 Twitter video. “But I want to tell you this: children are sold that way.” There is no evidence to support the theory, which has inspired threats against employees and impeded actual child trafficking investigations.

A month after that video, Ballard described conspiracy theorists’ support for his organization as a mixed blessing in an interview with the New York Times. “Some of these theories have allowed people to open their eyes,” he said. “So now it’s our job to flood the space with real information so the facts can be shared.”

Caviezel — who says Ballard recruited him onto the film after seeing him star in“ The Count of Monte Cristo” (2002) and Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” (2004) — has espoused even more extreme theories.

The actor appeared at a QAnon convention in Las Vegas in October 2021, giving a speech that quoted Mel Gibson’s final speech in “Braveheart” and included one of QAnon’s main slogans, “The storm is upon us,” which refers to the movement’s fight against the imagined pedophile cabal.

He has focused on one QAnon belief in particular while promoting “Sound of Freedom”: the idea that child traffickers drain children’s blood to harvest a life-giving substance called adrenochrome.

Speaking at a QAnon-affiliated conference in Oklahoma in 2021, the actor said Ballard wanted to join him but “he’s down there saving children as we speak, because they’re pulling kids out of the darkest recesses of hell right now, in … all kinds of places, uh, the adrenochroming of children.”

The moderator asked him to elaborate. “If a child knows he’s going to die, his body will secrete this adrenaline,” Caviezel said, his voice catching. “These people that do it, there’ll be no mercy for them. This is one of the best films I’ve ever done in my life. The film is on Academy Award level.”

In reality, adrenochrome is a relatively mundane chemical compound created by oxidizing adrenaline, though the author Hunter S. Thompson portrayed it as a kind of super-drug popular with pedophiles in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

Geesey, the Angel Studios executive, said anyone who posits that “Sound of Freedom” promotes conspiracy theories hasn’t watched the film.