Apostle – Review

_APO9514.NEF

Apostle  film review; British, horror, period

Directed by: Gareth Evans

Runtime: 129 minutes

Depending on where you sit in terms of hate-watching, guilty pleasures and embracing that all-too pervasive media zeitgeist, the hallowed ‘binge-watch’, the phrase ‘Netflix original’ may evoke a variety of different feelings. There’s the undeniably good (Beasts of No Nation; The Meyerowitz Stories), the just so-so (How It Ends; Okja; Mute), the “Why does this even exist?” (The Cloverfield Paradox; Death Note), and then, of course, the “What the fuck were they thinking?” (insert recent output from Happy Madison Productions). Thankfully, Apostle, the newest feature film from Welsh director Gareth Evans – best known for writing and directing The Raid and its sequel The Raid 2: Berandal – falls squarely into the first category. It’s a vivid, enthralling and often-times unsettling period film which, while not without its missteps, successfully mashes Evans’ knack for visualising kinetic action/martial arts cinema with the tension and tropes of the thriller/horror genre.

Apostle is set in the year 1905 on a craggy, remote island off the Welsh coastline. The film’s protagonist, Thomas Richardson (Dan Stevens), is a furtive and somewhat dishevelled man of few words, tasked with venturing to the island and infiltrating a spiritual cult who have abducted his beloved sister Jennifer (Elen Rhys) and are holding her for ransom. Once on the island, Richardson comes up against the cult’s enigmatic prophet figure Malcolm Howe (Michael Sheen), as the mystery surrounding the island and its inhabitants deepens, eventually revealing dark and sinister secrets.

For the most part, Evans chooses to delineate the film into two distinct sections. The first half of the film is a slow, tense and foreboding exercise in character drama. We spend time with the intensity of Richardson’s gaze, get introduced to the island’s inhabitants, and slowly begin to piece together the pieces of the larger puzzle that are just out of view: Where is Jennifer? Who are these people and what are they running/hiding from? What’s so special about the island? Why is there so much blood? Evans does great work here in terms of cinematography, with a multitude of visual set-pieces, resting wide shots and the heavy use of a dreary colour palette, to emphasise the isolation and desperation of the central characters.

About mid-way through the two-hour runtime, at the fulcrum of the big reveal, the film abruptly pivots into horrific acts of violence, mutilation and sacrifice. While not entirely jarring, the emotional beats necessary here do feel somewhat clumsy at times, and there are a few small plot contrivances that lessen the impact of key moments in the film. Evans chooses to eschew the need for heavy dialogue or dumps of exposition, preferring to whisk the audience back in time through narrative flashbacks, which add visual weight to Richardson’s troubled history and further enrich the lore of the island. As the inevitable chaos unfolds in the film’s second half, Evans puts his skills as an action film-maker to good use, cultivating a sense of urgency and pace with visceral fight scenes, hand-held camera work, quick-fire editing and splashes of blood and gore.

At the film’s mostly satisfying and earned climax, I was left with only a few unanswered (yet also tantalizing) questions. The world Evans creates here is one begging for more stories to be told, and leaves plenty to ruminate on (or, you know, write about in a film review). Ultimately, Apostle is a gripping and engaging piece of cinema: an interesting and original story, told with conviction and control behind the camera. With The Raid franchise and now Apostle under his belt, Evans is proving himself to be one of the most capable and exciting directors of his generation, and it’ll be interesting to see where he goes from here.

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply