Azrael (2024)

Score: 4 / 5

Sometimes the most rewarding viewing experiences are those about which you know nothing at all before entering a darkened theater. You're there for whatever the storyteller throws at you, and if the filmmakers have succeeded, you'll be swept into another form of consciousness. So, when out of the state and alone for the evening, I stumbled into a cinema with two brand-new horror flicks about which I knew nothing, I grabbed some mini bottles of Jack Daniels and smuggled them in to mix with a Coke, settled into a soft leather recliner, and prepared for a double feature with myself and no one else in the auditorium. In small town Appalachia, Friday nights are for the football games.

First up was Azrael, and the opening hits like a brick wall. Onscreen text sets the stage: many years after the Rapture -- "holy fuck," said I, downing one of the mini bottles before it could pour into the cup -- some of those left behind have been driven to renounce the sin of speech. What? Conservative apocalyptic fiction notwithstanding, this opening text forces far too many questions for its own good. Assuming that the film is referencing an evangelically dubious version of the supposed catalyst for the end of the world, who exactly is "driving" people to stop talking? Since when is speech sinful? And why would that particular sin take precedence over, let's say, mass murder, ritualistic homicide, irresponsible use of finite resources, or inhospitality to strangers?

Before we're able to cogently articulate these gaping concerns, we are thrust into one of the most interesting and strange movies I've seen all year. A young man and woman, clearly in love, wander a forest with some underlying tension. They don't speak, but they are mildly frustrated with each other, communicated through stern looks and vague gestures (one wonders, not for the first time, why over the years since the population instantly halved, a better means of communication wasn't learned? Like, I don't know, sign language?). Something dangerous in the forest is drawn by noise and motion (and possibly fire?), so the couple are pretty quiet and still, if not as rigidly enforced as the survivors in A Quiet Place. Without much warning -- or any context -- other humans burst upon them, Mad Max-style, rounding them up and knocking them out.

Like that, the woman played by Samara Weaving (according to the credits, the character's name is Azrael) is taken by a menacing older woman (some kind of grim enforcer of a cult's woodland compound) and made into an attempted sacrifice to the dangerous thing in the woods. Again, there is a lot happening very quickly in the start of this film, but my understanding is that Azrael and her man had either been exiled from this compound or had recently escaped to live alone in the woods. It also seems that the cult surgically cuts vocal cords of its devotees, as the main characters' lack of speaking is revealed later to not be a choice. For whatever reason, the cultists decided to use them as sacrifices, hence the capturing. Now, as Azrael is bound in a chair while the cultists turn their back and breathe rhythmically in some bizarre ritual, a blackened demonic humanoid creature materializes from the forest and lumbers toward her. Barely escaping, Azrael attacks one of her captors to distract the monster and flee. 

I won't share many more specifics about the plot, because this film is a wild ride of breakneck action and some really effectively disturbing sequences. I was on the edge of my seat the whole time, completely unsure what was going to happen next. Weaving works hard to sell this material, and her physicality has only improved in the somewhat similarly themed (and similarly gory) breakout hit Ready or Not. Her fight to survive though all hell has broken loose around her is a riveting journey to behold, even when it seems her endurance is a bit superhuman. Clearly, she wasn't named after an archangel for no reason, particularly an archangel associated with death. It eventually becomes clear that she's not just looking for escape; she's looking for revenge.

Riddled with religious imagery -- and plenty of subtextual thematic concerns about religion and womanhood and sacrifice and suffering -- the film's questionable plot devices might give some viewers pause. Why, exactly, the female leaders of this cult want to sacrifice Azrael and only Azrael might be an unanswered, mysterious MacGuffin, but it's never less than compelling. The film isn't a treatise on how to craft apocalyptic fiction or an exercise in thorough worldbuilding. It's an extended violent cat-and-mouse game that, for whatever aesthetic reasons, is placed in a weirdly specific setting. And it's fabulous in doing just that!

Apart from several other movie references and genre conventions -- including a Virgin Mary-like cult leader who is pregnant with, presumably, Rosemary's baby; including folk horror a la The Wicker Man or The Ritual -- the film's internal logic was only lost on me regarding the demonic monsters. At first I wondered if they were drawn to fire because they wanted it, but it does seem to also hurt them; more importantly, their appearance is that of having been injured by fire beneath their charred and crispy skin. Perhaps meant to be straight from hell, or perhaps meant to look this way after prior conflicts with the cult, the monsters also move in unpredictable and seemingly contradictory ways, sometimes shuffling along like undead sloths and sometimes sprinting like zombies in modern video games. Sometimes they are drawn to fire -- but apparently not within the compound -- and sometimes they are completely blind if you don't move. These inconsistencies will frustrate some viewers obsessed with worldbuilding, but they're easy enough if you assume (rightly, I think) that the filmmakers have answers for these quite natural changes (after all, no human is homogenous in this film, so why should the non-humans be thus?) that, due to their own imposed conventions, they just cannot tell us.

Inconsistencies like these weren't enough to derail my viewing experience, which was as thrilling as it was entertaining. Interspersed in the film were apparent chapter breaks with scriptural text, foreshadowing what is to come, tonally, but they were so fast and I was so engrossed that I didn't take notes to see if they were, in fact, biblical quotes, or if they were only meant to convey that flavor. Again, this is not the kind of movie where those details matter, especially not during a first watch. Weaving underscores her rightful title as a scream queen, and utterly impressed me with her physical prowess. The film's unrelenting action and horror made this a jolting exercise in frisson I'm eager to endure again soon. But next, the second part of my double feature: Bagman.