Studio: IFC Films/Shudder
Director: E.L. Katz
Writer: Simon Barrett
Producer: Dan Kagan, Simon Barrett, Dave Caplan
Stars: Samara Weaving, Vic Carmen Sonne, Katariina Unt, Peter Christoffersen, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett
Review Score:
Summary:
In a post-apocalyptic setting where speech is considered a sin, a captured woman fights for survival against a woodland cult.
Review:
Gimmicks are a great way to entice me into seeing a movie, which is likely the same case for many fans who enjoy films that break conventions to create something out of the ordinary. Show me a movie made to look like it was shot in a single take, occurs in real time, or uses the camera as someone's eyes, for example, and I'm probably going to watch it just because something different is being done.
“Azrael's" gimmick is that it is almost entirely devoid of dialogue. Set in a post-apocalyptic place where speech is considered a sin, the film follows a mute woman forcibly separated from her romantic companion by cultists who want to sacrifice her to feral humanoids that dwell in the trees.
I don't know what it is with Samara Weaving, but between movies like Joe Lynch's "Mayhem" (review here) and Radio Silence's "Ready or Not" (review here), she seems to really have a thing for roles requiring her to be soaked in increasingly absurd amounts of blood while slaughtering her way through an almost endless supply of attackers. That's essentially the same slugline for "Azrael," except now she doesn't even speak, making for a movie that's redundant as a Samara Weaving showcase as well as less engaging in terms of story.
Because there are nearly no spoken words, and because the setup is so thin that the script would probably appear invisible if you looked at it sideways, "Azrael" forcibly pads itself with filler scenes of Weaving's titular character fleeing through the forest, bandaging wounds, hiding from pursuers, and eventually exacting various acts of vengeance against the silent settlers who want to turn her into monster meat. Aside from those action sequences, whose regular reliance on fistfights, gunplay, and serendipitous escapes from restraints render them repetitive, "Azrael" basically becomes a survival thriller mostly spent watching Weaving go through the most uninteresting activities of routine woodland subsistence.
When "Azrael" cuts to end credits after only 78 minutes, one might wonder, "Did the filmmakers fool me into watching this flimsy adventure simply so they could have a laugh at my expense?" I imagine clips of the conversation where they pitched their concept sounded something like what follows. Feel free to add "for some reason" after virtually every sentence.
"Okay, so after some sort of extinction event that we'll never elaborate on, people now consider speech to be sinful. Actually, that includes all forms of communication, not just speech, because they don't write words either. Well, maybe not all forms of communication, and definitely not all sounds. Guttural chanting noises and ringing bells, those are okay. Don't worry about details, just go with it."
"So there are these feral people with charred skin that live in the forest. We can assume the unspecified rapture made them that way, but we don't know why these mute cultists specifically want to sacrifice Azrael to them. We'll have them be attracted to fire and the scent of blood. Oh, and a strong breeze suddenly blows whenever they're summoned. Let's just toss some cryptic chalk drawings on the wall of a makeshift church. Maybe the audience will infer some sort of religious prophecy regarding all of it and they can connect their own dots so we don't have to."
"Right, so fires are bad, which we know from Azrael's first scene where she frantically stops her companion from creating one, and from a vision she has later where the cult's camp erupts in flames. Yet it says here in the screenplay that one of the captors has his own nighttime fire going in a clearing and the settlement also has several torch and trash fires going almost all the time. How does that work?"
"Look, we haven't figured out how all of the fiction functions within this world. Some people are mute because their vocal cords were cut, as evidenced by the scar on Azrael's throat. Others can speak, they just choose not to. Then there's this one random guy who does talk, in a language other than English so no one knows what he's saying, who seems completely oblivious to everything going on with the creatures and the cultists, like he just drove in from a different movie. Again, we didn't know we'd have to think through everything. We signed Samara Weaving, secured funding, and assumed we could just go in front of a camera with half of a vague idea, you know?"
When you see multiple movies each week, and their mediocrity prevents them from reserving prime real estate in your memory, they tend to be remembered only by quick descriptions. "Azrael's" will merely be, "That one where no one talks and Samara Weaving fights her way through a forest." That's the trick with gimmicks. They may be a great way to lure a viewer, but if a gimmick is all a movie has to go on, then it's also a great way to ensure an audience swiftly forgets the film.
Review Score: 45
If a gimmick is all a movie has to go on, then it's also a great way to ensure an audience swiftly forgets the film.