Geeta Gandbhir and Christalyn Hampton’s Oscar-nominated short film, streaming on HBO Max, portrays a single day at the Feminist Center for Reproductive Liberation in Atlanta, letting viewers witness what happens when people arrive for medical care only to discover that accessing that care requires navigating a gauntlet of opposition. Tracii, the head of security at the clinic, begins her morning in prayer, and that image becomes the psychological anchoring point for everything that follows: a person using faith as a mechanism to prepare herself psychologically for a day that will require her to be a protective barrier between vulnerable people and forces designed to terrify them.
What Gandbhir and Hampton understand about Tracii’s psychology is that her faith isn’t incidental to her role as security. It’s absolutely central to how she approaches the work. She doesn’t carry weapons. She carries conviction. She doesn’t use aggressive tactics. She uses compassion. She begins her day in prayer not as a ritual that’s separate from her work, but as the psychological preparation that makes the work itself possible. She’s creating an internal state that will allow her to remain centered under pressure, to extend kindness to people who are terrified, to position herself as stable in an environment designed to create chaos.
The Psychology of Protective Presence
The film’s most psychologically potent moments occur in the ultrasound rooms, where women receive news about their pregnancies and their options within Georgia’s six-week abortion ban. One woman learns she’s still within the legal window. The relief she feels is profound and immediate. Another woman arrives one day too late. Six weeks and one day. The difference of a single day determines whether she can access the care she needs. That single day represents the absolute cruelty of how legislation materializes in actual human bodies and actual human circumstances.
Tracii’s function in these moments is to witness these women, to acknowledge their fear and their grief and their relief, and to hold space for whatever they’re experiencing without judgment. This is behavioral psychology in its most practical form: the recognition that presence and validation, offered from someone who clearly cares, can constitute a form of psychological protection. Tracii isn’t solving these women’s problems. But she’s signaling to them that they’re not alone in their fear, that their circumstances are being taken seriously, that someone sees them and cares about their well-being.
What the film doesn’t explicitly state but clearly demonstrates is that this kind of protective presence requires a particular kind of psychological strength. Tracii has to absorb the terror and desperation of multiple people each day. She has to do this while maintaining her own psychological equilibrium. She has to do this while there are people outside the clinic shouting that she’s complicit in murder. She has to do this while threats of violence exist. The psychological cost of this labor is never fully articulated, but it’s present in every moment of the film.
The Psychology of Faith Weaponized and Faith Lived
The documentary’s central psychological tension exists in the contrast between how the protesters outside the clinic use religious language and how Tracii, operating from the same faith tradition, uses religious language. Both groups claim to be motivated by Christianity. Both groups invoke God. But they’re invoking God toward opposite ends. The protesters invoke God to terrify and control. Tracii invokes God to comfort and support.
This is psychologically fascinating because it demonstrates something true about belief systems: they’re flexible enough to be mobilized in service of almost any agenda. The human brain is capable of using the same religious framework to justify harm and to justify compassion. What determines which direction the belief system moves is the intention of the person deploying it. Tracii intends to ease suffering. The protesters intend to prevent something they believe is wrong, even if that prevention requires causing fear and distress to vulnerable people.
What’s particularly psychologically interesting is that Tracii holds the protesters in her compassion as well. She doesn’t vilify them. She acknowledges that they believe they’re doing something righteous. But she also makes clear that their beliefs don’t override other people’s fundamental right to access medical care. She’s holding multiple truths simultaneously: that the protesters are motivated by what they genuinely believe is morality, and that their actions are causing real harm that she’s obligated to prevent.
The Architecture of Daily Resistance
The film’s strength lies in showing that resistance to oppressive systems doesn’t always look heroic or dramatic. It looks like checking the building for intruders. It looks like using numbered systems to protect patient identities. It looks like standing between people and those who would harm them. It looks like offering reassurance to people who are terrified. These are small, practical, daily actions, but they’re what actually constitute the work of maintaining access to care under circumstances that are designed to eliminate that access.
The psychological mechanism of this daily resistance is that it requires choosing, every single day, to show up and do the work even when the system is actively trying to prevent it. Tracii doesn’t get to rest from this. She doesn’t get to have a day off where she doesn’t have to think about security or threats or the women who will arrive seeking care. The work is constant and unending, and the psychological toll of that constancy is something the film captures in her face, in her demeanor, in the moments where you can see her drawing on reserves of strength that shouldn’t have to be required.
Where the Short Format Constrains the Depth
The film’s primary weakness is that its thirty-minute runtime, while appropriate for a documentary short, limits the psychological exploration it can undertake. There’s so much more that could be said about what working in this environment does to people over time, about the psychological cost of bearing witness to fear repeatedly, about whether Tracii’s faith actually sustains her or whether it’s becoming increasingly fragile under the weight of what she’s being asked to protect.
Additionally, the film is necessarily limited in how much it can explore the political and legislative context that created the circumstances documented. The six-week ban is mentioned, but the film doesn’t deeply interrogate how such bans accumulate to create environments where accessing reproductive healthcare becomes a kind of obstacle course. A fuller exploration of that political framework would contextualize the daily work of protection that Tracii performs.
The Burden of Bearing Witness
“The Devil Is Busy” is an understanding of what it actually costs to be someone who stands between vulnerable people and forces designed to harm them. Tracii’s faith provides her with psychological resources, but those resources are finite. Her compassion is genuine, but compassion under constant pressure becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. Her work is essential, but essential work shouldn’t require this level of psychological burden.
The film functions as documentation of a specific moment in American history, capturing what happens when reproductive rights are systematically restricted and when people in healthcare choose to continue providing care anyway, despite threats and obstacles and a system designed to prevent them. Gandbhir and Hampton have created something psychologically honest about what resistance looks like in practice, which is less dramatic and more exhausting than popular culture usually portrays it. Tracii is the truest Christian among the groups shown in this film, and the film’s achievement is making that distinction impossible to miss.
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