Tag: religion

Azrael

  By

★★★★
“Hell on Earth.”

If I see a more relentless and brutal film in 2025, I’m going to be quite surprised. This doesn’t let up, with people being eaten alive, impaled, decapitated and slitting their own throats when they realize the horror of… Well, let’s leave that to the film to divulge, shall we? I must say, you should probably read the first sentence of the Wikipedia synopsis, because there is a lot there, which the film does not explain. Admittedly, this is in part because it contains almost no dialogue, and there are a number of elements which feel near impossible to show, rather than tell. You don’t need to know them to enjoy this. But they will certainly answer some questions. 

What the film has is a mute woman, Azrael (Weaving) and her boyfriend,  Kenan (Stewart-Jarrett), getting captured by an equally silent cult in a forest. The time and era is uncertain, but they do have working cars, so it seems fairly contemporary. They want to sacrifice her to dark, humanoid creatures which inhabits the woods, but she is able to escape back into the wilderness. She attempts to return, so she can rescue her boyfriend, and encounters the group’s spiritual leader, the pregnant Miriam (Sonne). After failing to save Kenan, and narrowly escaping from the dark creatures more than once, as well as getting buried alive, Azrael vows to take bloody and fiery revenge on the cult, and also discovers the true nature of Miriam’s pregnancy. 

I don’t want to send Eva Green or Milla Jovovich out to the Sunnyside Retirement Home quite yet. But when they do decide go to the farm upstate, Samara Weaving might be best-placed to replace them. In Guns Akimbo, Ready or Not and now this, she has shown the ability to compel the viewer’s attention, even if the film might not be the greatest. She does it again here, despite doing the acting equivalent of having one hand tied behind her back, robbed of emoting with her voice. I can’t think of many current actresses who could pull such a trick off with such apparent ease, and help make what is admittedly a gimmick, feel surprisingly like a natural scenario.

She becomes quite the bad-ass over the course of proceedings as well. It’s not clear whether she was initially, since we get no real information regarding her previous history. But she needs to be, in order to survive against the monsters in the woods, who are among the creepiest things I’ve seen in a while. By the end, she’s enthusiastically hacking her way through what appear to be her former allies, although the ending is… ambivalent. I suspect there’s a lot of religious back-story here – Azrael is the angel of death in Islam [It’s also the name of Gargamel’s cat in The Smurfs, but that’s probably less relevant!] There’s scope here for an entire feature before this, plus likely one after, and I’d watch both. Just a shame it got buried on a second-tier streaming service like Shudder.

Dir: E.L. Katz
Star: Samara Weaving, Vic Carmen Sonne, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Katariina Unt

 

Desert Redemption

  By

★½
“Hell on earth.”

I’ve no problem per se with faith-based cinema. My main issue is that they tend to be, literally, preaching to the converted, and if you’re not already on board, they tend not to work, purely from a cinematic perspective. There are exceptions: The Furnace is a solid enough tale of struggle against adversity. This, however, is not. It is instead a woefully dull entity, whose religious coating seems more like a layer of gold plate on a tin bauble, and about as honest.

It focuses on a family of three: father Bill (Way), mother Rebecca (Roberts) and teenage daughter Katie (McMahon), who go on a hike in the desert for Mom’s birthday. Question #1: what was wrong with a nice dinner at Olive Garden? For a more inept group of explorers it’s hard to imagine. Rebecca falls off a cliff; Bill breaks his ankle going for help, also losing both their map and the car keys; and Katie gets bitten by a rattlesnake. Personally, I’d take these as messages from God that they should have gone to Olive Garden. It’s up to Katie, as the least injured of the trio, to try and make it out to get help. She’d better hope some divine entity is on her side, because the family’s desert survival skills are negligible.

I mean, if you’re going to try and hike out, even I (who does not hike), know to set out as soon as it’s light enough to see, rather than wait until the sun is blazing down.  I could forgive the idiocy, if it led to exciting predicaments. Nope. If you want to watch first Bill, then Katie, staggering around the desert in scenes that seem to last forever, you’ll love this. There’s no sense of Katie having admirable resilience or any talent that she uses, instead relying on blind luck and prayer to get out of her predicament. There is a failed example of Chekhov’s Gun – or, in this case, Chekhov’s Coyote. The family encounter said animal near the beginning of their trek, and given the cover (above), I kept waiting for it to show relevance in some way. Let me spoil this for you: it never happens.

We do get Bill suffering severe religious guilt over being tempted by an invitation from the office harlot (Sample), and vowing to be a better man if only God would spare him and his family. Here’s an idea: just be a better man? Mind you, he goes off such a creepy vibe, I would not be surprised if he has a hooker tied up in the basement. Positives in this are hard to find. The photography isn’t bad, with some nice desert locations. The presence of cameoing saguaro cactii makes me wonder if it was filmed here in Arizona. However, I can’t say for sure, since the credits consist of nothing except the cast. It’s as if no-one behind the camera wanted to accept responsibility for this, and I can’t say I blame them.

Dir: Auturo Gavino
Star: Savanah D. McMahon, Bill Way, Gloria Jean Roberts, Brooke Sample