If anyone’s cornered the market on cool-as-fuck genre leads, it’s Samara Weaving. Ready Or Not, Mayhem, The Babysitter; in less than a decade, the Aussie actress has fought fiercely to become the go-to heroine for ballsy, bloody and crowd-pleasing horror. Usually emerging triumphant and caked in goo after a vengeful crusade with a wry, knowing smirk, by 2024, a Samara Weaving movie is essentially its own sub-genre. And while her latest – grubby post-apocalyptic thriller Azrael – is largely still all of the above, it’s not only a very different performance, but a film that’s significantly harder going than one would expect too.
Written by The Guest and You’re Next’s Simon Barrett, and directed by Cheap Thrills gore fiend E. L. Katz, Azrael is an unruly beast; an almost completely dialogue-less revenge story set in the deep backwoods of North America, in the years following what is only ever described as a ‘rapture’. The few humans left have shunned speech, cutting out their vocal cords and living in small fundamentalist clans amongst the rusted-out remains of a world long gone. The only building that remains is a church. The only language spoken are grunts, whistles, and occasional muted screams, as they’re chased down and torn limb-from-limb by packs of charred-looking goblins that live amongst the trees.
It’s safe to say that laugh-a-minute, Azrael is not, but with a set-up as compelling as the above, the grimmer tone isn’t much of a handicap. Although for a great deal of the film’s run-time, said set-up is very literally all we really have to go on. Even the fundamental background of Katz and Barrett’s world – not only why nobody speaks, but what exactly said ‘rapture’ entailed – is quietly nudged to one side here, perhaps deliberately, perhaps not. The lack of speech is at first fascinating, but quickly a huge and unruly roadblock. Particularly as Katz’s visual storytelling struggles to keep pace with the action, and muddled murals and hurried prophecies are thrown around without much focus or precision, either as set-dressing, or as a pointed attempt to fill us on what we’re missing.
Instead we’re constantly tossed from bone-cracking set-piece to questionable emotional outburst. Desperately trying to make sense of things on the fly as Weaving’s stoney-faced woman-with-no-name (credited as Azrael in the final crawl) and her partner (a very welcome Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) catapult themselves through the woods, fleeing a group of violent druid-types, who seemingly want to sacrifice them to the creatures. Naturally Weaving doesn’t stay the victim for long, and Barrett’s script rather quickly shifts gears into a scrappy action flick (who saw that one coming?) which is a much more satisfying fit. But even then, there’s only so much shock and punch an actioner can muster when we’re never fully clear on the scale or consequences of what we’re seeing.
Carlos Laszlo’s bare-bones production design and Mart Taniel’s earthy, but plenty cinematic photography go some way to filling in the blanks. Everything’s overgrown and cobbled-together; a muddy, messy scrapheap that’s maybe a little too close to every other post-apocalyptic scrapheap, but it does the trick for what is very purposefully a small story with limited characters. The goblins of the forest are a standout – fronted by a gorgeously nasty design that recalls The Descent – even if they’re more of a side-effect of the world, rather than its primary antagonist.
All-in, fans of Weaving and Barrett and Katz will have fun with what quickly becomes an impressively staged and vicious little revenge movie. It just constantly feels like there’s so much more here that goes completely uncovered thanks to what once was a compelling premise, and by the end, feels more like the only thing standing in its way from flourishing.
Azrael was screened as part of Pigeon Shrine FrightFest 2024.
