.

This weekend I treated myself to a pair of horror films, one that was older, and I had seen before, Planet of the Vampires, and a new one in theaters, Azrael.

IFC Films

Azrael, filmed in Estonia, is a Christian themed horror film set an unspecified number of years after the ‘Rapture’ has removed the faithful from the Earth. The character Azrael (Samara Weaving) and her boyfriend have fled their isolated religious community trying to avoid becoming the zealots next human sacrifice to the violent monsters stalking the forest.

The community at some time in the past reached the strange conclusion that speaking was a sin and have made all their member’s mute. Azrael’s struggles to escape, survive, and extract revenge are all carried out without a word of dialog from the principal characters. A secondary character not from the community does appear in the second act but he speaks no English, leaving the film with zero English dialog.

Azrael presented several scenes of graphic violence and gore. The forest monsters, looking like charred and burnt corpses, act much like modern zombies with modern graphic make-up effects. The film has zero nudity, sexuality, or sexual violence, presenting the situation as a fairly straightforward struggles to survive. Most of the action, violence, and injury are presented in a believable fashion that doesn’t shatter suspension of disbelief. The films Christian mythological underpinnings play a vital part in the films resolution and mark the film in the same category along with movies such as Rosemary’s Baby & The Omen, but without the deep theological questioning of a film such as The Exorcist.

Written by Simon Barret and directed by E.L. Katz, this film is a challenging and bold experimentation. Denied dialog for exposition it’s a project that requires audience engagement as the viewer is constantly interpreting the events on screen. It is not a move that can be enjoyed with only half of one’s attention. Composer Toti Gudnason ably carries a great of the film with the score while cinematographer Mart Taniel captures the eerie nature of the Estonia wood as he did with 2017’s November.

I am left with questions about the world building and how this world works. IMDB lists all the character with their name, but in a community without spoken or even signed language how do names even work? That said, letting go of such questions is easy enough in the moment as the story unfolds.

Azrael is currently playing in limited release and should be making its streaming debut on Shudder soon. It is not a film for those who insist on frequent kills and witty banter, but it is one I am quite glad I watched in a theatrical setting.