Samara weaves in a high-concept horror film

“Azrael”

Courtesy of C2 Motion Picture Collection/Mossbank

Take ingredients from successful post-apocalyptic novels e.g The last of us And A quiet place, throw it into a cauldron, add some vague references to Satan, pour in several buckets of blood, and boil it at a high temperature while stirring frequently, and you’ll end up with a strange brew that tastes like a new high-concept horror movie. , Azrael.

It was picked up by Paramount Global’s revived distribution arm, Republic Pictures – which had once released films like Orson Welles’s. Macbeth And John Ford The quiet man – This familiar, well-executed genre swashbuckler delivers enough gory thrills to grab some eyeballs when streaming live. It premieres in the Midnighters sidebar at SXSW.

Directed by L. Katz (Petty crimes(From a text by Simon Barrett)you are next), two vets of the horror game, the film checks all the right boxes — a beautiful heroine on the run, flesh-eating zombies (or zombie-like creatures), twisted biblical symbolism, and multiple beheadings — without necessarily bringing anything new to the world of the horror. table. The film’s only major innovation, that none of the characters speak, has already been a staple of the genre for years, with franchises like A quiet place And Don’t breathe Exploit the concept to the maximum.

this does not mean Azrael It’s not fun to watch sometimes, especially if you like your horror movies to be bloody, muddy, and devoid of any deeper meaning. Katz and Barrett know how to deliver non-stop action: their film hits the ground running and doesn’t lag for 85 minutes that feature some standout set pieces, particularly a nighttime jeep ride heading south at speed. But without much of a story, and with characters with little to no substance, the bloodshed becomes boring before we even get to the final big twist.

To justify the film’s wordless narrative, the opening title card explains that speech has been forbidden since the “Rapture,” which we assume is some kind of apocalypse, occurred many years ago. Humans have been left to wander in a dark forest inhabited by blood-sucking humanoid creatures, which, as the title suggests, have some connection to the Angel of Death from Christian lore – a theory exacerbated by the primitive frescoes we see painted inside an ancient church run by a creep. Priestess (Vic Carmen Son).

Trying to survive amidst all the chaos is popular heroine Azrael (Samara Weaving), who we first meet as she’s frolicking with her boyfriend (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) in the woods. They are immediately pursued by a group of monk followers who tie up the girl and attempt to sacrifice her to one of the hemoglobin-drinking forest monsters.

But Azrael manages to escape – which she does in almost every scene – to make her way to a small community where he lives Mad MaxDeserted style among barbed wire and rusty old cars (they also somehow have access to rechargeable LED lanterns). These people are all out to catch Azrael as well, prompting the poor girl to keep running away until she can’t escape anymore.

Since no one mumbles a single word (except for one sequence where a man suddenly speaks in Esperanto), you don’t learn much about Azrael or anyone else, which means you don’t necessarily care when zombies occasionally rip their heads off and suck the blood out of them. To them, it’s like they’re swallowing Slurpees. Silence is the film’s main asset and main limitation, it creates moments of suspense but also leaves us in the dark, to the point where it feels more like a gimmick than anything of substance.

Katz has a knack for staging fight and chase scenes, which is essentially what happens here, in collaboration with Estonian DP Mart Taniel (Captain Volkonogov escaped) to get a lot of visual mileage out of a $12 million budget. However, the jungle setting feels redundant – not unlike the plot itself – and Azrael It would have benefited from more variety throughout, although Totti Gudnason’s score (Pregnancy) and the Blair brothers (Toxic avenger) enables the pulse to be maintained pulsating.

The fabric provides an intense and grueling physical performance that requires her to run a lot, or scream her lungs out without making any noise at all. It seems completely exhausting, and by the time the movie ends and Azrael finally returns to her normal state, we’re pretty exhausted too.