Director – E.L. Katz, Screenplay – Simon Barrett, Producers – Simon Barrett, Dave Caplan & Dan Kagan, Photography – Mart Taniel, Music – Tóti Guðnason, Visual Effects – Magic Lab (Supervisor – Filip Latal) & Riddle Monk Studios (Supervisor – Matthew Kemper), Special Effects Supervisor – Johan Harnesk, Makeup Effects/Puppet Effects – 13FingersFX (Designer – Dan Martin), Production Design – Carlos Laszlo. Production Company – Traffic./Homeless Bob Productions/Two Squirrels Productions/north.five.six..
Cast
Samara Weaving (Azrael), Vic Carmen Sonne (Miriam), Katarina Unt (Josefine), Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (Kenan), Peter Christofferson (Demian), Eero Milonoff (Luther), Rea Lest (Liesel), Sebastian Bull Sarning (Isaac), Phong Giang (Sevrin)
Plot
It is after The Rapture. Some people have forsaken the sin of speech and gotten rid of their vocal chords. Azrael and her lover Kenan flee from one such group but are captured. Azrael makes an escape and flees through the woods, hunted by the others.
I first encountered director/writer E.L. Katz a few years ago with a small film called Cheap Thrills (2013), which asked would people be prepared to do for money and pushed the answers into some quite perverse places. Prior to that, Katz written several of Adam Wingard’s early films – Home Sick (2007), Pop Skull (2007) and What Fun We Were Having (2011), as well as Adam Gierasch’s Autopsy (2008). Katz went on to direct the A is for Amateur segment of ABCs of Death 2 (2014) and the gritty crime film Small Crimes (2017), as well as produced and directed episodes of The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020). Azrael was Katz’s third feature film as director.
Azrael comes with a script from Simon Barrett, who has reasonable reputation as a genre screenwriter, having written screenplays for Dead Birds (2004), Frankenfish (2004), Red Sands (2009) and Temple (2017) and acted as a regular screenwriter for Adam Wingard with A Horrible Way to Die (2010), Autoerotic (2011), What Fun We’re Having, You’re Next (2011), The Guest (2014), Blair Witch (2016) and Wingard’s segments of The ABCs of Death (2012) and the V/H/S films. Barrett directed the Tape 49 segment of V/H/S/2 (2013) and The Empty Wake segment of V/H/S/94 (2021), before making his feature-length debut with Séance (2021).
Azrael is a unique film in that it is a film made without dialogue. There is a brief amount of dialogue in the section where Samara Weaving is rescued by Peter Christofferson but it is without the benefit of subtitles (and is apparently Esperanto according to E.L. Katz). Everything else is delivered by gestures – but with no sign language, no subtitles or anything. It is real take-no-prisoners type of filmmaking. There have only been a few films that have been so adventurous before. Surprisingly, 2024 gave us three such films with no dialogue along with the similar post-apocalyptic Year 10 (2024) and the animated Flow (2024).
Samara Weaving greets the Biblical Apocalypse
Almost immediately out, you wonder what on Earth world it is that we have stepped into. The only clues we get to anything that is going on come in the title cards that say “Many years after The Rapture/Among the survivors, some are driven to renounce the sin of Speech”, which suggests some sort of Post-Apocalyptic work that has taken place after the Biblical Rapture – see Biblical End Times Prophecies. The name Azrael derives from the Qu’ran and is supposed to be the Angel of Death and was later incorporated into Judaeo-Christian mythology – although on the end credits we find that Azrael is merely the name of Samara Weaving’s character.
You spend most of Azrael trying to work out what the heck is going on. Things like – why Samara Weaving and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett are made prisoners? Why they are being hunted by the cultists? Who the strange figures in black that are pursuing people through the woods? What the nature of the non-human pregnancy at the end is meant to be? The characters operating without any dialogue suggests something of the similar post-apocalyptic work that was A Quiet Place (2018), albeit without any alien invading monsters present, or perhaps even more so of Luc Besson’s Le Dernier Combat (1983). But then you also wonder if it is a post-apocalyptic work at all like in the scene where Samara Weaving comes across Peter Christofferson and he is speaking, tunes into a regular radio station, while he and others seem to have a plentiful supply of gas and ammunition – which suggests more that we are in a work set in the present and this is simply a film about a strange religious cult. It all arrives at a brutal and bloody climax.
