Director: E. L. Katz
Cast: Samara Weaving, Vic Carmen Sonne, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett
Rating: (TBC)
★★
REVIEWED BY AMASIO JUTEL
The "silent horror movie" is one of the least interesting gimmicks we’re seeing repeated in contemporary horror, and Azrael (shudder) follows this well-trodden path.
Human survivors of the Rapture have formed a cult and sworn an oath not to speak. Meanwhile, Azrael (Weaving), a young female member, escapes sacrifice to ancient evil demons.
If you make a dialogue-less (or dialogue-slight) film, your visual storytelling must be good — a picture can tell a thousand words, but if your picture isn’t very good, a thousand words might be better. I bet Weaving could deliver dialogue pretty well.
The film has an attractive aesthetic, with blood red title cards and heavy practical effect usage, but the pretty images aren’t enough. The aesthetically interesting but contextually ineffectual pictures don’t begin to provide answers to viewers’ myriad questions.
The monsters have a phenomenal design and even better physicality — the impossibly unnerving horror "stagger" — but a total blandness in character.
Interesting horror monsters represent the untempered, libidinal urges exploding into repulsive excess. But this film is not interested in such commentary.
Azrael does continue 2024’s trend of blood-covered, cult-church antichrist birth scenes, speaking to cultural anxieties around abortion rights.
None of the horror is horrifying, but, to give it the credit it deserves, its runtime is a brief, refreshing 78 minutes.
