The Evangelist

This movie is extraordinarily well-written, directed, acted and photographed—especially remarkable as the first feature by a 21-year-old film-school student—but it is ruined by its unrelentingly mean-spirited message.

It would be impossible to praise too highly every technical aspect of this movie, or to single out any one of the four elements I listed in the first sentence as being better than the others. Everything about it is spectacularly good, except for its heart.

As I was watching it, I marveled that the writer-director Nate Chapman did not take Hollywood by storm, did not even make another movie after this one, now almost 7 years old. (Equally remarkable is the fact that I am its first reviewer.) Technically, this movie is every bit as good as another first-timer, Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. (The Welles influence throughout this movie is unmistakable.) But by the time I reached the end I no longer wondered why Chapman's career began and ended (so far) with this one movie. I'm glad it did.

The Evangelist's brutal cynicism is unrelenting; it wastes enormous intelligence, talent and energy in what amounts to the temper tantrum of a very gifted but hate-filled child. It's like being vomited on and then bitten by a precocious but monstrously spoiled and angry—and vicious—four-year-old.