Director E.L. Katz (Cheap Thrills) teams up with writer Simon Barrett (You’re Next, The Guest) to craft a tense, harrowing, often crazy gory film. There’s quite a bit of flesh ripping and more than a few spurting neck wounds. They straddle subgenres, combining elements of post-apocalyptic tales, religious terror, undead yarns, survival stories, and a touch of folk horror for good measure. The momentum is propulsive, and the film rarely slows down to let us catch our breath as the filmmakers put their hero through hell time and time again, repeatedly bludgeoning her within an inch of her life.
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Beyond the opening card that tells us about the rapture and the silence, Azrael drops us into this world with little explanation or context. There are no exposition dumps, and we learn about this place by experiencing it along with the characters. It’s an immersive strategy that places the viewer right there in the thick of the action and creates an unsettling and uncertain immediacy that works to the film’s advantage.
Despite the lack of dialogue, Weaving does a fantastic job conveying everything she feels and thinks through nonverbal means. A movie that makes this choice lives or dies by what the lead can do, and she runs the gamut without ever saying a word. She’s fierce and fragile, scared and angry, and an array of other emotions one might experience while being stalked by people you know in a world full of monsters. The rest of the cast handles themselves well in similar circumstances, but Weaving is by far the standout.
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The lack of dialogue is a strength, but it hamstrings the film on occasion. It intentionally leads to a variety of questions. Some of these build an air of mystery that enhances the tension and pressure, while others are left dangling to incite frustration. Like when Azrael and her partner are escaping at the very beginning, it’s unclear how desperate they are to leave. They’re obviously freaked out by the prospect of being found, but they don’t run all that far from homebase before they stop to fart around in the woods for an extended break. Not as far as you might think if you were being hunted. Azrael’s motivation also remains vague and gauzy as the film progresses. She keeps getting away only to return and you have to ask why. Is it revenge, is it something else? Again, some of this murkiness is intentional and pays off, but it’s also the film trying to play it both ways, which doesn’t always work.
The end seems destined to divide audiences. It takes a big, wild swing that harkens back to gritty ‘70s grindhouse fare that plays like a post-apocalyptic zombie Rosemary’s Baby. It’s definitely not going to be for everyone, and as much as I kind of love it, I don’t know that it’s entirely earned by the movie that comes before.
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Despite points where the internal logic comes into question and the concept wears thin, Azrael has enough sense to get it, do the thing, and get out while wasting as little time as possible. This is 78 minutes sans credits, and it clips. For the most part, this is a fun, thrilling throwback with a unique enough concept, and it largely succeeds thanks to Katz’s tight direction, Barrett’s crafty script, and another excellent horror performance from Weaving. [Grade: B+]
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