AZRAEL - Mark Reviews Movies

Azrael, IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 26, 2024

No noteworthy character in Azrael speaks. This should not be a hindrance to storytelling, as an entire era of movies has proven for a century now, and the lack of any speaking characters isn't the issue with Simon Barrett's screenplay. It's that the movie itself doesn't make much effort to communicate anything more than the basics of its post-apocalyptic—or, more accurately, mid-Apocalyptic—tale.

How do we know when the story and within what context it is set? Well, Barrett and director E.L. Katz inform us as much right at the start, with introductory text explaining that the Rapture has occurred and that some survivors have stopped speaking as a kind of atonement for their sins. Ignoring the fact that one requires at least a fundamental understanding of Christian end-of-the-world mythology for the setup and payoff of this story to make any sense, what is the thinking of introducing so much loaded back story into a movie in which no one within it will be able or willing to explain it?

The background of Barrett's plot really doesn't matter too much, though, except as an excuse for the characters not to speak, as an explanation for why the villains seem to be part of an insulated religious cult, and as a justification for the conclusion to be as weird as it is. Boiled down to its essentials, the plotting here is little more than an extended chase, followed by third-act bit of revenge. The religious angle, perhaps, gives it an air of import, especially with occasional intertitles highlighting Biblical verses, but that air is far too thin for any of this material to really breathe.

The action revolves around Azrael (Samara Weaving), whose name, like all of the characters here, is only revealed in the end credits, because it's not as if she's introducing herself or anyone else is speaking to her. Azrael lives in a forested area, where she has one scene of tenderness with a man named Kenan (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett). Characters don't have to talk to communicate information or anything that might reveal some basic degree of humanity, of course, but a single tentative kiss sure doesn't say much of anything about these two as individuals or a couple.

Soon enough, the pair are being chased through the woods by a group of men. The couple split up to evade their pursuers, but both are captured, driven into a deeper part of the forest, and separated. The men and their maybe-leader Liesl (Rea Lest) have a plan for Azrael. It involves binding her, cutting her shin with a straight razor, and summoning someone—or something—from the forest with some rhythmic panting.

Without much going on here, it's difficult to determine exactly how much to reveal about the smaller details. There is someone or something in the woods—a whole group of someones or somethings, actually. They're either creatures akin to demons or humans that have turned feral after some incident. There's a scene later, in which Azrael seems to receive exposition telepathically, that might answer the question of these figures. As soon as one is using telepathy in order to maintain the gimmick of bypassing spoken communication, though, there's a deeper issue at hand with storytelling than whatever questions might remain about the particulars of the story itself.

The basics of the story are fine enough for the little the filmmakers are doing here. Azrael has to avoid the cult members and the creatures, infiltrate the camp of the former to find Kenan and see that they worship a pregnant woman named Miriam (Vic Carmen Sonne), and then escape from both parties hunting her again and again. The action is staged well enough, even if it's undermined by the cultists coming across almost as empty-headed as the monsters that are driven only by eating human flesh, and considerably violent. That, apparently, is enough in the minds of the filmmakers, and it might have been the case without such a heavy reliance on incorporating inscrutable back story into something so simple.

What we get instead, then, is a simplistic tale with the false belief that it has something bigger and more complex to say. Azrael constantly frustrates, not because it's operating on some basic level of storytelling, but because the filmmakers either can't communicate what they want to or are so invested in the background of their tale that they overlook the fundamentals right in front of them.

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