Apostle (dir. Gareth Evans, 2018)
Jamie McDonald: Yeah, yeah, I went see There Will Be Blood, and there wasn’t any fucking blood!
Malcolm Tucker: There was some blood!
Jamie McDonald: Och, there was hardly any fucking blood.
In the Loop (dir. Armando Iannucci, 2009)
Thomas Richardson (Dan Stevens), a morphine addict with a dark past, is tasked with rescuing his abducted sister Jennifer (Elen Rhys) from a mysterious cult that inhabit a remote island off the coast of Wales. The leaders of the cult are a trio of ex-convicts Malcolm (Michael Sheen), Quin (Mark Lewis Jones, and Frank (In the Loop’s Paul Higgins) who discovered this island whose bounty can only be maintained through the sacrifice of animals and bloodletting from the faithful. Thomas infiltrates the cult as a convert, but that might not be enough.
Jamie McDonald would be very happy with this film, because unlike Paul Thomas Anderson’s film about greed in the American West, this folk horror story set in 1905 has gallons upon gallons of blood. Just so much blood.
Unfortunately, I found that to be the only thing Apostle had in abundance.
Gareth Evans is best known for his work in Indonesia, specifically the martial arts films The Raid and The Raid 2: Berandal. You can see the connection between them and the handheld fight scenes that dominate the second half of Apostle, but I found his direction lacking in the slower paced and dialogue heavy scenes of the first hour. I like many of the actors in the film, especially Dan Stevens and Michael Sheen, and they all do decent work, but the material’s just not quite there. There’s a long tradition of folk horror in British cinema, and you can see the reverence Evans holds for The Wicker Man and The Witchfinder General, but homages only go so far. You can understand what would draw people to Summerisle what if the fun festivals and such, but the converts here only seem to be fleeing the most dire poverty of Edwardian England. While that’s more than enough reason to leave a place, it doesn’t quite explain why you’d be willing to slice open your arm nightly to drain blood in a jar.
It’s not a bad film, not at all, but it’s still disappointing.
October 30, 2018
oliveresque 