Azrael

Many years after an apocalypse, a devout cult of mute zealots hunts down Azrael, a young woman who has escaped from their clutches.

The film opens with some context:

Many years after the Rapture… Among the survivors, some are driven to renounce their sin of Speech.

It's not great context, but it's context nonetheless. One thing this little bit of context does give you is a sudden realization...

Oh shit, is this going to be yet another film where no one talks?

Yep. Turns out, Azrael is largely silent. Damn it... This is always a gamble. Can your actors properly convey the emotion, story, and the intent of a scene without words? It's a big gamble. Even worse, it's usually a gimmick too, one that is usually the result of a puffed-up little director thinking it gives their little genre flick an edge, or makes it "arty." Sometimes, it's more likely intended to distract from the film's obvious lack of budget, or to hopefully blur the writer's somewhat glaring lack of talent. Sometimes it's all of those things combines. Whatever it is, it most often feels like the question of "why do this at all?" has been completely ignored.

Admittedly, sometimes it works. Sometimes, not allowing your actors to speak, and relying instead on facial expressions and grunts actually does add to the film, like in the incredible Hundreds of Beavers, or the also incredible Sasquatch Summer. Sometimes, it seems like a filmmaker has recognized that this is simply too tall of an order for their film. So, in order to bridge the gap they have created between the film and the audience's understanding of the narrative (but still keep the film's characters from speaking), filmmakers will opt instead to create a made-up language, like in Out of Darkness or Polaris. This almost never helps, but they do it anyway. Most of time, not only do the grunts and gibberish of the stupid made-up language make the dramatic events of the films seem silly, it doesn't solve the original problem that having no dialogue brings, In fact, it only adds to them. But all that aside, the dimple fact is, most of the time, opting to have a largely silent, largely dialogue-free film just doesn't work at all.

This is the case with Azrael, where having no dialogue is the main reason why the film doesn't work. Honestly, the best you can say about this film is at least it didn't add a stupid made-up language...

Well, except for some Esperanto.

Azrael starts many years after the Rapture.

The Rapture, of course, is a very popular piece of Crazy Christian pop culture. It describes an End of Times apocalyptic event when all the dead Christian believers will be resurrected and, along with the Christians believers who are still alive, will all together vanish and go to Heaven, leaving the dirty mud people non-believers behind in a kind of Mad Max-ian type Hellscape of Devils and Sex and Cocaine and booze and partying, I think. I'm not entirely clear on all of the details for the same reason that I'm not entirely clear on why The Heaven's Gate cult killed themselves as the Hale-Bopp Comet passed overhead, because who the fuck cares? Either way, like Billy Joel, the greatest writer of showtunes for straight men, once said: "I'd rather laugh with the sinners then cry with the saints."

Anyway, the Rapture is often taken as actual gospel, despite the fact that it is not actually from the Bible, and was completely made up in the 1830s by a zealotic old white guy Christian cultist by the name of John Nelson Darby, presumably after he had had a series of mini-strokes, or perhaps after he had eaten the wrong kind of mushrooms, or maybe after he had some spicy food (read: a pinch of pepper) and it gave him heartburn, which then resulted in him having a bad dream one night. Either way, he then declared this confluence of murky gibberish and Bible fan-fic to be a vision from "god" and as a result, two hundred some odd years later, the Evangelical Christians have basically fucked over the entire world.

So, anyway, in the film...

There's this little compound of dirty shacks in the woods, and everyone who lives there is in a cult, so they have all cut out their vocal cords. Why they do this? How long have they been there? Who knows, but they now live the life of muddy, grub-eating forest-dwellers according to weird possibly bible-related rules. Presumably, I should say. We don't know for sure, because the only rule we do know is they all cut out their vocal cords, so none of them speak.

Mostly, they hide behind their compound's unimpressive wooden walls from the Burned Ones. The Burned Ones are burnt zombie-like creatures who roam around the forest all herky-jerky, drawn by the scent of blood, and preying upon human flesh. It isn’t clear if the Burned Ones exist because of the Rapture, or if they used to be people that the community knew who got infected somehow, or if they're the recently resurrected dead, or if they're the damned who have escaped from hell, or what, but whatever they are, they eat human flesh, they drink blood, and they really like to gnaw on intestines, so it's generally a good idea to avoid them.

Also, there may be a malevolent force in the woods that is given voice by the wind passing through the creaking upper boughs of the trees. Does that mean this story takes place in the same world as the TV show Yellowjackets, perhaps in the future? Unlikely, sure, but to be fair... this is also unclear.

For unknown reasons, Azrael and her boyfriend have left the cult. This is apparently not allowed, so the cult's head dog, this warrior woman, runs them down and captures them. The cult kills the boyfriend and then decide to sacrifice Azrael to the Burned Ones. This is also for unknown reasons. Is it supposed to Appease the Burned Ones in some way? Is it a regular thing? Is this why Azrael and her boyfriend left? All of this is unclear. Whatever the reason, they tie Azrael to a very interesting chair carved from a stump, but she manages to escape.

And that's when she starts killing cult members...

That's the whole film.

Girl and guy try to escape cult. Cult kills guy. Shit gets real. Girl kills cult. It’s a long cat and mouse movie where the mouse just gets the absolute shit kicked out of her the whole time, but somehow keeps running.

While I do love a good cult movie, I generally don’t do Bible shit, so that means I have no idea what the greater plot is here, or why anything is happening. Are the events of this film taking a little bit of artistic license and mirroring parts of the Bible, or perhaps some of its fan-fic? Is this film full of nods to recognizable Bible moments that would be clearly apparent to Bible fans, much in the same way that I happen to recognize minor characters in comic book movies? Who knows? Not me, that's for sure, because nobody says anything throughout the film. Whatever the case may be, I don't think being unfamiliar with the Bible would've been an issue, if not for the fact that the film was largely silent.

But since I'm not interested in bible shit, and the film is largely silent, I have no idea what the hell was going on in the ending. Y'see, there's a church in the cult's compound, as one would expect, and a woman lives there, a Mary-like figure who wears clean white dresses. This means she's the cult's leader, for as we all learned in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, you can always tell who's in charge by how much shit they’ve got splattered on them. Inside the church, the walls are all covered in crude paintings that possibly depict the history of the cult, or maybe a prophecy, but which seems to involve a woman and some fires. The cult leader lady is pregnant, and during the big climatic fight, where Azrael sets everything on fire, the cult leader lady gives birth, and the baby is maybe the AntiChrist? Or just ugly? I don’t know, either way, it’s a goat-like creature, and the Burned Ones love it, and now Azrael, since she is Baby Goat Boy’s adopted mom, I guess, she's apparently the Queen of the Burned Ones now too.

I think.

A sort of apocalyptic Rosemary's Baby meets the Quiet Place riff, supposedly inspired by screenwriter Simon Barrett’s recurring nightmare (who I was shocked to discover wrote The Guest, which is fantastic), Azrael is probably also meant to be a commentary on the violence inherent in the system, especially for women in christianity, but if so, it's a clumsy one that doesn’t actually say anything, mostly because, again... there's no dialogue.

The undeniable truth here is… if you’re telling a story in an unfamiliar place, with unfamiliar rules, and then you decide that the characters won’t be speaking at all, your story is only going to end up incomplete and unsatisfying. Without dialogue, your worldbuilding and your lore, of which this film clearly has a lot of, will all be rendered pointless. Promising to tell an entertaining genre story, but then forcing your audience to piece it together from whatever context clues they can grab onto, if they’re even able to see them at all in the blood-splattered, candle-lit forest darkness? That’s just a bad idea.

Especially when you then decide to include a scene where a guy in a pickup happens upon Azrael at the side of the road. Who knows where he’s coming from, who knows where he’s going, but he doesn’t seem like a wanderer or a traveler, he seems more like he’s commuting home after a day of work, possibly as a laborer of some kind. I don’t have any basis for this, it's just, as the Mighty Mighty Bosstones said, that’s the impression that I get. Anyway, he turns out to be sympathetic, and gives Azrael a ride. Great, right? She’s safe. hooray.

Nope.

Y’see, she can’t talk, right? No vocal cords. And the guy in the pickup only speaks fucking Esperanto for some inane fucking reason, and all without subtitles too, all of which makes it feel like the filmmakers are deliberately giving the audience the finger, instead of any answers, or at least a little insight into the story. Because why would they want you to understand what is happening beyond a very surface level, right? What a bunch of assholes. And this is made all the worse by the fact that the guy in the pickup honestly seems to be completely ignorant of the fact the Rapture has happened, or that there’s a cult in the woods who've cut out their vocal cords, or that there’s burnt corpse zombies with a hunger for human flesh roaming the area too, which is odd, considering that his truck doesn't seem like it's packed for long travelling, so you would assume that means that he's a local, and you'd think the locals would be aware of the crazy shit in these woods. And yet, here he is, he’s just inexplicably crusing through Maniac Woods, he stops to pick up this filthy chick on the side of the road, who can’t talk and also seems VERY upset, and he’s just not concerned... he's just babbling away at her, like: “Some weather we’re having, huh?”

Then he gets shot by one of the cult members…

What does this scene even mean? We get nothing from it. We’re told nothing. We’re only given more questions. Questions like… who the fuck was the guy in the god damn pickup? Why the fuck was he speaking fucking Esperanto? Where was he coming from? Where is he going? Why is he so seemingly nonchalant about the fact that he's driving through the Burnt Cannibal Corpse Forest? Also, is it normal to have a pickup these days, because I thought the Rapture had happened. So, was there actually a Rapture? Is this cult yet another version of those dipshits in the movie The Village? Why is any of this happening?

That's the entire problem with this movie, it leaves too much unsaid, and because of that, it says nothing.

I will say that Samara Weaving is great. She couldn’t save this stinker, but she’s always great. She is the Queen of the Scream Queens. I've got no complaints about the Poor Man's Margot Robbie.

The rest of the film though? It lacks shock and awe. Worst of all, it’s lacks a narrative foundation. On the surface, it’s a good looking, somewhat befuddling mix of zombie horror tropes, survival horror tropes, supernatural horror tropes, and a handful of Bible shit, but it loses any of its potentially redeeming and interesting aspects quickly when it becomes apparent that surface is all it's ever going to be.

Unremarkable, tepid, and forgettable. Pass.