Like all texts, Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus is enfolded within multiple generic forms and tendencies. The musical, the road movie, and the ethnographic film all play a part in the way the film functions as a form of representation, but the documentary genre is the one within which it predominantly participates as a screen product. Yet the extent to which the film has been received as a documentary depends on who is doing the analysis. In Joshua Land's 2005 review of the film in The Village Voice, he remarks that the film operates as a road movie but casts aside “road movie linearity” for a type of “surrealism” that is cobbled together from such abstracted images as an old bus abandoned in the woods, a house floating on a lake, or the disembodied arms of a Pentecostal worshipper (2005, 50).

In Southerners on Film, Andrew Leiter problematizes the eclecticism of southern cinema, and asks rhetorically, how can one categorize a film such as Andrew Douglas's “surreal” Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus? (2001, 8). In Slant magazine, reviewer Nick Schager calls the film an “impressionistic pseudo-documentary” consisting of confessional interviews and staged scenes wrapped up in a surreal mixture of “religiosity and criminality” (2005). While in The Journal of Southern Religion Charles Reagan Wilson suggests that the film has “severe limitations as a documentary” since it compromises its credibility by not offering balanced or diverse representation (2006).