Summary This article investigates the nature of religious experience as embodied in contemporary Latin American culture. With this in mind, he presented the study of two recent Chilean films (La passión de Michelangelo, 2012, and El Cristo ciego, 2016) featured by two characters with chronic characteristics. Both films are ambivalent in the face of the religious phenomenon: on the one hand, they invalidate the possibility of miracle and thus of faith; on the other hand, they keep open the possibility of the ‘divino’ (according to Meschonnic’s conception) entering the life of characters that have become incedless. Tension between vision and word is key to articulate this ambivalence in philomic language. The result of the analysis is interpreted in the light of religious developments in Chile and Latin America as described in various studies on the sociology of religion.