Azrael (2024)

Many years after the Rapture – or so one of the film’s very occasional expository titles explains – a woman - let’s call her Azrael - (Samara Weaving) and a man named Kenan (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) flee through a forest, apparently hunted by members of a cult or some cult-like community. The two must have belonged to these people once, for they both have mutilated vocal cords that make them unable to speak, like all of the cult members. Given this fact, only few concrete explanations for anything will be forthcoming.

The cultists manage to catch the two and separate them. We follow Azrael. Bringing her to a clearing and strapping her to a chair, the cultists proceed with a ritual. Chanting without vocal cords, it turns out, sounds like a really violent kind of breathing exercise. Apparently, they mean to sacrifice the woman to the creatures roaming the woods. These things look like undead burn victims, follow the smell of blood and have a nasty habit of ripping their victims to pieces. Azrael manages to escape, but her hunters are not willing to give up; whereas she attempts to rescue Kenan.

I have to admit, going into E.L. Katz’s Azrael I was somewhat nervous about the whole post-Rapture business – I am seldom in the mood for religious proselytizing, and even less so in the holiest of months in my private religion. Fortunately, this is not that sort of Christian horror, but rather the kind that uses elements of Christian mythology strictly as a basis for a proper spook show.

For at least half of the film’s runtime, it’s not terribly clear why this has to take place in a religious kind of post-apocalypse at all, but the further things go along, the clearer it becomes that this is to a degree a spiritual sibling to films like Immaculate and The First Omen. Apparently, something is in the air when it comes to the horrors of birth and pregnancy in connection with religion. Thanks to the near complete lack of dialogue, the audience has to put quite a bit of work into figuring the film out – there is a degree of unsolvable ambiguity here, particularly when it comes to the motivations of the cultists, but that’s part of Azrael’s charm.

In spirit, this is very much the classic kind of low budget movie you could imagine Roger Corman producing in the 80s, making a lot out of working under difficult circumstances, finding a way to make a bigger movie than the money should actually allow (in this case, by shooting in Estonia), and putting more intelligence and energy into the film than it would strictly need. No cheap irony or “aw shucks, we’re not talented enough to be good, so let’s suck ironically”, here; instead actual filmmaking.

Katz has a lovely eye for the sort of shot that stays with a viewer – at least this one. The first appearance of the monsters, the trip in the lit-up car through the dark woods, the whispering coming out of a hole in a wall to instruct the believers – all of this is wonderfully conceived and realized.

There’s an admirable relentlessness to the film. Once it starts, there’s a feeling of constant forward momentum, of constant threat, which is particularly effective when paired with the audience’s attempt at figuring the film’s world Azrael is first driven through and then driving against out without giving us much space to reflect on much of anything. Simon Barrett’s script has some lovely touches, particularly when it comes to pulling a viewer’s expectations sideways. Moments other films would use to let their heroine take a breath and get some exposition quickly dissolve into chaos and violence again, about half of the time set pieces resolve unexpectedly (which makes the times when they do so expectedly much more interesting as well).

Last but not least, Azrael is another showcase for the incredible physical acting of Samara Weaving, the sort of performance you’d nominate for the Academy Award for Best Physical Acting, if said Academy had the good sense to have this sort of thing.

As it stands, an imaginary award will have to do.

In short: Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins (2021)

As regular readers know, I have a high tolerance for modern blockbuster movies and their specific foibles. Still, I have no problem judging this one to be one of the more pointless pieces of overbudgeted crap I’ve encountered in my time.

Apparently, Hasbro is hankering after its own Hasbro Cinematic Universe (stop laughing!), and decided to start it with…an origins spin-off about a popular G.I. Joe character. Directed by Robert Schwentke, director of completely personality-free and nearly painfully mediocre highish budget mush like R.I.P.D. and RED. And indeed, Schwentke here continues to show a complete lack of personality or style as a director, not exactly doing much wrong on a technical level, but never doing anything right or just interesting either. He’s also really great at getting disinterested performances out of perfectly decent actors, like everyone in this one’s cast.

Clearly, you don’t want to start out your Hasbroverse with anything that’s entertaining or even vaguely ambitious.

The film does remind me of the terrible first Wolverine movie in Fox’s X-Men universe a lot more than of anything Marvel has put out, in that its script consists exclusively of clichés anybody in the market for this kind of film will have seen used better in a hundred other films, dragged out interminably. Worse, it really wants to have all of the clichés, and so trundles off in twelve different directions, one after the other. There, the film finds nothing of interest but certainly uses every opportunity to slow things down to a crawl, and turn about seventy minutes of usable stuff into a two hour movie that never seems to end.

It also suffers from an inexplicable need to explain any old nonsense about Snake Eyes, though, admittedly, there’s nothing in here quite as pointless as the origin of Wolverine’s leather jacket. On the other hand, Wolverine’s leather jacket never decided that a stone that spits a bit of fire is a horrible super weapon, unlike this one.

On the plus side, the Hasbroverse can only get more interesting after Snake Eyes, if it survives a first outing quite this lacking in personality and reason to exist.

Three Films Make A Displeased Post: Get Loaded

Children of the Sea (2019): I’ve read decent things about Ayumu Watanabe’s anime adaptation of Daisuke Igarashi’s manga, but I can’t say I ever warmed to the film watching it. The storytelling often feels needlessly vague, with character motivations that might actually make a viewer interested in these personality-less ciphers kept even more so, and a plot that never actually seems to want to get anywhere, spouting half-baked philosophy that really needed much stronger visuals to convince. From time to time, the film’s depiction of lights in the sky and underwater worlds is at least rather pretty, but the animation often has surprising problems with the anime standard of using digital technology to still create a movie that has a hand-drawn feel to it, sometimes looking as if it were made ten years ago when anime filmmakers weren’t sure how to do this.

Guns Akimbo (2019): If you’re in the market for a film that wastes Daniel Radcliffe (who was better when playing a highly practical corpse than here) and Samara Weaving on a combination of flat social media satire, only the most obvious and least funny jokes, and action scenes that lack choreography and imagination, do I have the film for you here! If you’re into films with a loud and obnoxious tone, as if made by people trying to hipster up the Neveldine-Taylor formula (if you can imagine that), all the better! If not, well, then take my advice and avoid this thing like the plague. I certainly wish I had.

All the Bright Places (2019): Speaking of films that waste perfectly good actors, Brett Haley’s Netflix teen drama romance thing with Elle Fanning and Justice Smith is the perfect note to end this entry on. On paper, this might be a perfectly good example of the hopeful teen indie movie, but structurally, this is a catastrophe, a film seemingly so badly in love with the idea of emotionally investing its audience in the hopefulness of its tale it forgets to actually portray the grief and pain of these teens properly before the inspirational music starts tweeting and all the postcard pretty pictures start flashing. Turns out that speaking about living after pain is not terribly convincing when you’re not actually acknowledging the pain itself properly and only treat it as something to kitsch away from as fast as possible.


Not helping is terrible dialogue that may or may not have been written by robots who like to quote Virginia Wolfe, pretending this sort of thing signals a teenager as worthy of an audience’s time, instead of writing characters who are.

Ready or Not (2019)

Grace (Samara Weaving) certainly didn’t expect that marrying into the rich (through board games!), rude and rather eccentric family of Alex Le Domas (Mark O’Brien) would end up with her spending her wedding night quite the way it’s turning out. There’s a family ritual involved everyone marrying into the family must go through, you see, so whosoever becomes part of the family has to draw a card containing the name of a game from a box. That box has been handed down through the generations and comes with a nice little story of what sounds decidedly like a family deal with the devil. Poor Grace, or lucky Grace, depending on one’s point of view, alas, draws the somewhat problematic card of “Hide and Seek”.

Nobody tells her what the special family variant of this single deadly game in the deck entails, and soon, her new family is hunting Grace through the house trying to hobble her with weapons and catch her so they can sacrifice her to Satan. Neither Alex nor his black sheep brother Daniel (Adam Brody) are quite in with this particular program, but family is difficult, and rich boys tend to lack backbone. Man, but the rich are different.

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s and Tyler Gillett’s Ready or Not is a pretty great example of what focussed direction, a game cast, and wonderful timing can make out of a very simple basic idea. One could hold it against the horror comedy that its social criticism isn’t terribly complicated and just a bit obvious – a problem it shares with most “the x are terrible” films - but the film does put visible effort not in the basic situation but into why in the hell anyone would take part in this thing – apart from as it will turn out very well justified fear for one’s own life – and so those family members that aren’t total caricatures make actual sense as people doing absurd and violent things for believably shitty people reasons. Which I believe to be quite an achievement to get into a film that is basically one long sequence of chases through a couple of rooms and corridors and a patch of woods with captures and reversals of fortune. It’s fascinating how small the scale of the film actually is when one thinks about it; yet the actual movie never feels small or constrained, but focussed and doing exactly what it sets out to do in the best way possible.

This is also one of the rare horror comedies to always manage to find the right split between the jokes and the suspense, often intermingling both brilliantly. There’s nary a moment where the humour stands in the way of the suspense or vice versa, leaving us with a film that is as exciting as it is funny.

In large part, this is the achievement of the lean and minimal yet very clever script and of a director duo who really make the most of the opportunities that come with this sort of thing. However, there’s also a great cast who can shift between the coarser and subtler moments of the writing with ease, adding dimension without showboating. Samara Weaving is obviously great, throwing herself into every single scene with the kind of controlled abandon that makes a great horror actress, while shifting from dry quipping to actual human emotion and back again with natural ease, but the supporting cast hits every note as wonderfully. Why, even Andie McDowell does not seem to have been made out of wood for once.


In addition to all that, Ready or Not looks rather fantastic too, making as much of wood-panelled walls and soft light as any horror film I can remember. It’s a joy to watch from start to finish, even avoiding the lame twist ending that some horror filmmakers now seem to think is mandated by law in the genre, simply wrapping up its plot in a fitting manner.

Three Films Make A Post: Every house has a history. This one has a legend.

The Black Hole (1979): I’m usually a sucker for Disney in their dark/weird phase, but Gary Nelson’s leadenly directed science fiction feels like an overpriced TV movie, and not a good one at that. Perhaps it’s the cast of tired looking veterans (some of whom I usually love) that gives this impression, or dialogue so leaden it’ll give US SF cinema of the 50s a run for its money, or the script that randomly cobbles together elements of Star Wars, the pulp SF that influenced that film (but without George Lucas’s understanding of the form), 2001 and any old crap the writers could come up with.

In any case, the handful of good, dark and interesting ideas here and the sometimes brilliant production design can’t make up for characters whose actions don’t even make sense if you interpret them as walking talking clichés, desperately lame action sequences (the worst actually a laser gun fight between our heroes and a bunch of robots standing unmoving in one line), and the film’s complete failure to create a coherent tone.

Mayhem (2017): Joe Lynch’s horror comedy about a corporate lawyer (Steven Yeun) and a woman with foreclosure troubles (Samara Weaving) using the automatic get out of jail free card of an outbreak of a rage-inducing virus to murder their way up to the executive floor of his company on the other hand does know exactly what tone it is going for. It’s mildly cynical carnage, pretty people bathing in the blood of their enemies and some very obvious satire of the evils of capitalism (as embodied by Steven Brand and his underlings). It’s a pretty fun time, if you’re okay with a bit of slaughter (and who isn’t). It is well paced, sometimes funny enough for a series of guffaws, and certainly acted with full involvement by everyone on screen. I do wish its capitalism critique were a bit more nuanced/interesting/unobvious, though I am not completely certain the sort of angry, bloody slapstick this is going for could actually carry more depth.

Eve’s Bayou (1997): Last but pretty much the opposite of least, there’s Kasi Lemmons’s brilliant black southern gothic movie that camouflages as magical realism for the the mainstream viewer. It’s a sumptuously (but never the kind that’s just for show) styled tale of a black upper middle-class family in the Bayous of Louisiana, of the way secrets and lies are as much part of what forms a family as is love and understanding, of the ways we construct memory regardless of what’s the factual truth about things and persons and perhaps even about the things we did or were done to us. It’s heady stuff, told with great assuredness, and full of small and large complexities and ambiguities in the ways its characters behave and relate that feel truthful to the way actual human beings are.


At the same time as she’s being honest about people, Lemmons gives the film’s gothic melodrama quite a bit of oomph, using her brilliant ensemble cast (of exclusively African American actors, but the film doesn’t make a big thing out of that, as it shouldn’t need to) for gestures grand and small.

Three Films Make A Post: These aren't everyday people and this is no ordinary movie.

The Babysitter (2017): Kid (Judah Lewis) learns his beloved/lusted after babysitter (Samara Weaving) and her friends are satanists of the type really into human sacrifice and playing truth or dare to warm up; also, milking the blood of the innocent. A night of somewhat bloody mayhem ensues.

Given his usual predilections, this shallow horror comedy directed for Netflix by the name-disabled McG is downright un-annoying, keeping the pseudo-hip ad-man style the guy’s been using for a decade now somewhat in check enough to actually tell a straightforward tale in an effective, well-paced manner. The film generally manages to ignore all the best opportunities talking – or making decent jokes – about all kinds of interesting stuff connected to the meaning of being a grown-up, burgeoning sexuality and so on and so forth and trades it in for pretty young people, a lot of blood, and an okay rollercoaster-style time. It’s a perfectly okay way to spend (less than) ninety minutes with pretty, moving, mildly bloody pictures without much behind them.

Kwaidan aka Kaidan (1964): On the absolute opposite of the horror movie spectrum stands Masaki Kobayashi’s venerable classic of a horror anthology based on Lafcadio Hearn’s versions of Japanese ghost tales. It’s slow-moving, artfully stylized, mixing moments deeply informed by Japanese theatrical forms with techniques right out of the German expressionist handbook as well as others as state of the art of filmmaking in 1964 as you’d expect of a Japanese film. It’s a movie that manages to be at once deeply rooted in traditional Japanese culture and aim for the universal as it is expressed through ghost stories, filtered through a the work of a man who wasn’t Japanese by birth. Given its three hour running time and its calm and theatrical air, one might fear this is the kind of “classic” mostly feeling worthy and dead like certain museum pieces do, but in truth, the film’s still challenging and moving, at times creepy, at other times bizarre, and absolutely daring in the way Kobayashi expects his audience to follow him in seemingly peculiar directions. Of course, following him is extremely rewarding.

It Comes at Night (2017): Supposedly the straightforward horror follow-up to Shults’s incredible Krisha, this is actually a film that seems to very consciously – just look at the title and what doesn’t happen in the film! - evade explanations and exposition that would help an audience make sense of its in theory simple viral post-apocalypse tale. What exactly is the nature of the illness striking the world? Is it a metaphor for inner tensions and fractures of the film’s characters more than an actual disease? Are the nightmares of the film’s viewpoint character (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) only an expression of his anxiety and fear, an early symptom of the infection, or a hint at the supernatural? This and more the film’s not going to explain. What you get instead is a movie about a breaking and broken family unit during an ambiguous apocalypse, filmed with a mounting sense of dread and acted brilliantly by Harrison, Joel Edgerton, Carmen Ejogo, Riley Keough and Christopher Abbott, moving slowly but surely.


I’m not completely sure the film needs to be quite this ambiguous about so many things, but as a mood piece and a portrait of human self-destruction, the film’s very successful to my eyes.