Azrael review/Q&A event coverage
There’s been somewhat of a vogue for dialogue-free genre films in the past decade, including titles such as John Woo’s Silent Night, No One Will Save You, Boy Kills World and, of course, A Quiet Place. These movies eschew language to focus on pure visual cinema, hearkening back to silent film and the primacy of the image. To be sure, some are more successful than others, but one has to admire the attempt to try something different.
Director E. L. Katz and screenwriter Simon Barrett’s new picture, Azrael, adds notably to the dialogue-free group, but it also belongs to an even larger genre subset, the glorious “Ya messed with the wrong woman” revenge flick. This category includes such gems as Coralie Fargeat’s suitably titled Revenge, Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill and Brian De Palma’s Carrie, to name but a few. It also includes the amazing Samara Weaving in the modern comedy/horror classic, Ready or Not, in which she demonstrates her qualifications as a kick-ass heroine. Weaving stars in Azrael, an entertaining postapocalyptic thriller in which her reputation as a veritable Valkyrie of violent retribution is further enhanced.
A quotation at the beginning of the story places the date as “many years after the Rapture,” and explains that talking is now widely considered a terrible sin. Azrael (Weaving) and her partner, Kenan (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), are seemingly content together in a forest when they are captured by members of a religious cult. Azrael is bound and left to be sacrificed to a burned humanoid, but she manages to escape. She goes looking for Kenan at the cultist’s camp, which is led by the pregnant Miriam (Vic Carmen Sonne). As she tries to rescue Kenan and avoid being killed by the cultists or the burned creatures, Azrael begins to unravel the mystery of the cult.
Weaving ably carries the movie on her shoulders with her strong lead performance. It’s impressive not just for the tons of running and climbing and fighting in real forest conditions – the sheer physicality of it – but also for how she shows all of her thoughts and emotions nonverbally. Her facial expressions are so evocative that we’re never in doubt about what Azrael is feeling. The other actors do a good job with what they’re given to work with, but unfortunately their motivations are often less clear.
Director E. L. Katz excels with the action and suspense set pieces, moving the camera fluidly in a setting where that couldn’t have been easy. Two sequences in which Katz very effectively ratchets up the tension include a harrowing crawl through a dark tunnel and a scene in which the burned man slowly approaches the bound Azrael. His choice to seemingly use practical effects for violent moments adds a visceral element that works well in this brutal scenario. Phil Lee’s sound design (the creaking of trees, the rising winds) and Tóti Guðnason’s score do a lot of the heavy lifting for a film in which sound is especially important. Mart Taniel’s cinematography is often lovely, particularly in depicting the alternating aspects of the forest, from shafts of heavenly light creating a misty morning oasis to the spooky moonlit hunting ground of the woods at night.
Screenwriter Simon Barrett has written one of my favorite horror films of the past fifteen years with the superb You’re Next (another “Ya messed with the wrong woman” film), but unfortunately his script for Azrael isn’t entirely successful. None of the characters other than Azrael stand out, and other than the lack of dialogue, the story itself is unmemorable. Although Barrett includes visual snippets of this world’s mythology, it’s too thin to put together, which robs the conclusion of power and instead is simply confusing. The inclusion of pseudo-biblical quotes between scenes doesn’t help.
I saw Azrael at the fabulous Alamo Drafthouse in downtown L.A., a delicious bowl of churro popcorn on the seat table before me, there to enjoy not only the film but also an exclusive Q&A with Katz and Barrett. The very welcome surprise moderator for this event was horror icon and fan favorite Barbara Crampton (Re-Animator, From Beyond), who happily pointed out that You’re Next was the movie that restarted her acting career. She was a terrific, energetic moderator, asking intelligent questions and positing her own theory as to what the setting and mythology of the story were (which was mostly confirmed by Barrett).
Barrett explained that with this project he was making an attempt at “less conscious filmmaking,” and that he was inspired partly by Luc Besson’s 1983 work, Le Dernier Combat, which is also postapocalyptic and mostly dialogue free. He also said that the lack of audience handholding in terms of the world of Azrael was a deliberate choice, feeling that not having all the answers was part of the appeal. “We were making a movie for the kind of horror fans that we are.”
Katz said one of the reasons he wanted to tackle this story was not having to deal with long monologues. He recounted that due to the lack of dialogue that the audition process was confusing for the actors, who submitted a lot of “Yoko Ono stuff.” The film was shot in Estonia, close enough to the ongoing war in Ukraine that they saw tanks and witnessed soldiers crossing the border to escape the fighting. He pointed out that blocking out scenes in a forest was often challenging, trying to protect his lead actress from inadvertent stumbles. Katz also explained that the burned monster men costumes originally displayed genitalia, but that this turned out to be an unwelcome distraction and was ultimately removed.
It was a lively and informative interview that added to the experience of seeing the film, and having Crampton conduct the event was an unexpected bonus. I liked Azrael even with my issues with its script – it looks and sounds great, Weaving is terrific, and overall it’s an enjoyable film.
Azrael is playing only in theaters.