Azrael, directed by E.L. Katz (Cheap Thrills) and written by Simon Barrett (You’re Next, The Guest), is the most hard-hitting movie I’ve seen at Fantasia so far, and it was one of my most-anticipated, too, solely because I saw the words “post-apocalyptic” and “Samara Weaving” in its plot summary. I didn’t need to know anything else.
Weaving impressed me immensely in The Babysitter and Ready or Not, and she continues to cement herself as a bona fide scream queen with Azrael.
As mentioned, the movie is set in a post-apocalyptic world, and follows a young woman, played by Weaving, as she fends off a cult of mute zealots from which she escaped.
And when I say “mute,” I mean that the movie contains almost no dialogue, as most of the characters can’t speak. That experimental slant makes Azrael a masterclass in “show, don’t tell,” and in trusting your audience.
Without dialogue or exposition, we’re left to put together the pieces of who the characters are, what relationship they have to one another, and what world they occupy, without having it explicitly spelled out. That’s a really difficult thing to pull off. It takes guts to make a movie with no dialogue (and the little dialogue we do get is unintelligible), and that conceit could very easily have been mishandled. But it mostly works here.
There’s no exposition, except for what we see and can interpret from what’s happening on screen. We don’t get any insight into what the characters are thinking and feeling, except for what they convey through their facial expressions. That’s a testament to the cast, but especially to Weaving, who has to carry the movie through its 85-minute runtime and absolutely knocks it out of the park. When introducing the film, Fantasia’s artistic director described Weaving’s performance as “utterly feral,” and there’s really no better way to describe it. She goes for broke, and gives us warmth, fear, desperation, exhaustion, rage, and more, all without uttering a word.
The rest of the cast is good too, but someone like Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (Misfits, Utopia—a show I’m still mourning a decade later) feels underutilized here. This is partly why I said “mostly” earlier. While I found the lack of dialogue to be mostly effective, I do think it inherently limits how much information we, as an audience, can glean. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in itself, because it makes the world-building a bit more evocative and ambiguous, rather than being over-explained. But it also limits how much we can connect with the characters, and it makes a lot of the secondary and tertiary characters feel quite thin. Stewart-Jarrett, for example, plays Weaving’s love interest, and while the two do a pretty good job selling the relationship, there’s simply not enough here to really make us care.
You can learn a lot about characters from how they speak, but we don’t even know our characters’ names until the end credits. You can kind of assume Weaving’s protagonist is the titular Azrael, but it’s not certain till those credits roll.
It can also be hard to maintain interest and attention when there’s no dialogue to hang your attention onto, so the film has to make up for it in other ways. Some of those work really well, like giving us a compelling actor as a lead or well-crafted sequences of action or tense horror. But the dark, same-y forest setting (the film was shot in Estonia)—while often beautiful and creepy and fitting for a post-apocalyptic horror—doesn’t really add too much visual interest for someone like me, at least, to stay engaged with. I can only speak for myself, and maybe it was just my state of mind that particular night, but I did find my thoughts wandering a bit at times. The movie also felt a bit longer than I expected it to with an 85-minute runtime, and I suspect that has to do with the lack of dialogue to propel things forward.
Still, Azrael doesn’t overstay its welcome, and I have to give it credit for committing to the bit.
And aside from its dialogue-free conceit, it’s also very committed in other ways. The action is brutal, with some excellent, hard-hitting sequences that are expertly executed. The gore is gruesome, and the creatures are pretty terrifying, with some fantastic make-up and costuming. Oh, yeah, did I forget to mention the creatures? Human cultists aren’t the only bad guys here, as Azrael also has to contend with the crispy, humanoid, flesh-eating monsters that they apparently worship.
The sound design also goes very hard. In general, the sound has to do a lot of heavy lifting here, and it’s great. It’s crunchy and impactful, adding to the visceral feel of the movie.
Ultimately, despite its flaws, the movie just has a lot of things that are very much my jam: Samara Weaving getting bloody and kicking ass, post-apocalyptic settings, revenge narratives, creepy woods, pulse-pounding action, scary monsters, and religious horror (Azrael, of course, refers to the Angel of Death, which may give you a hint at some of the ideas and imagery the movie is playing with). It’s a squirmy, gory, post-apocalyptic religious cult revenge action horror, starring Samara Weaving, with no dialogue. I’d say that rates pretty damn high on the cool meter.
A lot of those elements felt reminiscent of other movies, including, among others, The Descent and Rosemary’s Baby, but I don’t say that as an insult. Those are two of my favourite horror movies, and being reminded of the greats isn’t necessarily a bad thing when the product is this solid. Azrael may not be the most original movie, but originality is overrated anyway.
Verdict
Azrael isn’t perfect, but it does a lot of things really well, and overall, I thought it was a very effective action-horror. It goes for broke with an experimental dialogue-free script that wouldn’t work nearly as well as it does if not for star Samara Weaving. Weaving is the main draw here, giving a ferocious and guttural performance that makes this worth a watch. While some viewers may feel lost or uninterested without dialogue to provide context or insight into the characters, the elements that do work—visceral action and gore, great sound design, make-up and costumes—add up to make this movie feel like a gut-punch.
Shea Angus