Maybe it’s weird to watch a post-apocalypse movie right before this particular election, but I’d wanted to see AZRAEL and then I saw that it was on Shudder. I knew it was a low or no dialogue movie starring Samara Weaving (MONSTER TRUCKS, THE BABYSITTER, SNAKE EYES), and not much more, but “genre movie starring Samara Weaving” is enough for me. It would’ve been a bonus if I’d known it was written by Simon Barrett (YOU’RE NEXT, THE GUEST) or if I recognized the name of director E.L. Katz from the dark comedy CHEAP THRILLS.

We’ve seen so many post-apocalyptic worlds, but this is a new one for me. It opens with a card that says, “Many years after the Rapture… Among the survivors, some are driven to renounce their sin of Speech.” Yes, it’s a movie where none of the main characters speak, or even sign, so the details of their situation are never directly addressed. But that leaves plenty of space to interpret and contemplate.

Was there really a Rapture, or is that just how the survivors explain whatever disaster happened? Did these characters experience it themselves, or was it before their time? Has almost everybody swung hard into religiosity in response to being left behind, or is that only the people we’re seeing? We stay in a forest the whole time, we have no idea what’s left of civilization, though there’s one great scene that implies the whole world isn’t like these woods. (I’ll talk about that in a spoiler section, but it’s not a plot twist or anything.)

The end credits reveal that all the main characters have names, and yes, Weaving’s is Azrael. She has a boyfriend/husband/partner named Kenan (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, CANDYMAN 2021) who she seems to live happily with, though she gets mad at him for making a campfire. She was right on that one, because the smoke attracts some guys who attack them and throw them in the trunks of their cars. I hate to say “I told you so,” honey.

They get split up, and the movie sticks with Azrael, who is strapped to a chair and cut with a knife as cultists led by Josephine (Katariina Unt, NOVEMBER) do a strange breathing ritual that seems to summon… somebody (Sonia Roszczuk). My feeling when I first saw this thing was that it could be a monster, could be a zombie, could just be a feral person covered in tar. We know she wobbles around like a weirdo, is attracted by the smell of blood, and will eat your fuckin throat, so perhaps a specific definition isn’t that important. She’s trouble, is all. (If you want to know, I learned from the credits and research that these things are called “the Burned Ones.” But luckily I still don’t know what they are or where they come from.)

Azrael is gritty enough to escape, and goes looking for Kenan at the cult’s compound – an elaborate tent city protected by barriers made of branches, chickenwire, barbed wire and rags. It reads to me like she’s discovering this place for the first time, but I don’t think that’s right, because she has a cross-shaped scar where her vocal cords were removed. She was one of them. But at some point she decided she wanted her own life.

Whatever their deal is with the Burned Ones, this cult also has a church full of candles and murals, a pregnant lady who dresses like Princess Leia, and a hole that they listen to the wind through (for religious purposes). I don’t know, I don’t want to ridicule their beliefs.

Non-verbal movies are still pretty novel, despite a recent wave of them (the A QUIET PLACE series, the alien home invasion movie NO ONE WILL SAVE YOU, John Woo’s SILENT NIGHT). But I knew going in that would be the gimmick, so it’s the “Many years after the Rapture” part that surprised me. When I was contemplating whether any post-apocalypse movie had used that setup before I realized, duh, there’s the whole very lucrative Christian book and movie franchise LEFT BEHIND. And surely some ripoffs of those. But one thing that’s interesting about AZRAEL’s world is that major religious ideas having been proven real doesn’t change that believers shouldn’t be hurting people in the name of their religion. Yeah, there’s magic now, so what, you’re still being an asshole. As things boil over at the end there are even more inexplicable happenings of a religious nature and I like that the movie doesn’t try to tell me (or at least didn’t succeed at telling me) what to think about them. It goes to weird places.

This is a really impressive turn from Weaving, not just because she’s creating an interesting character without her voice or her sense of humor, but because she brings a new dimension to her physicality. There are some good, messy fights in it and it turns pretty much full-on action for a while when she burns down the encampment. The action designer is Radoslav Parvanov of Alpha Team Stunts, who doubled Scott Adkins in THE LEGEND OF HERCULES and Sylvester Stallone in THE EXPENDABLES 3 and was fight coordinator for THE PRINCESS.

Azrael proves to be a capable runner, warrior and scrapper, and yet it’s not at all the same performance as, say, MAYHEM or READY OR NOT. In those she’s a normal person who gets pushed over the edge and turns savage. In AZRAEL she’s been uncivilized for a long time, maybe came up that way. There’s a great part where she runs at a guy and slices his head clean off with a machete, standing there as it slides off the neck and drops, like a samurai winning a duel. You can imagine the cool action stance she could do after that, but instead she slumps her shoulders oddly and glances, unimpressed, as blood pours out of the neck stump

(Admittedly after that she does get a cool slo-mo walk through the burning camp.) There’s some really good gore in this thing, and when it’s her doing it she tends to have less of a cool action hero look than a kid-who-doesn’t-know-any-better. Like so many other aspects of the movie, her personality is pretty open to interpretation.

Sometimes when I’m streaming movies on a whim I’m susceptible to distraction, and this one’s really not gonna work if you can’t give it your full attention. But luckily it lulled me into its rhythm. It’s well produced – great looking, atmosphere that grows thicker as it builds to its pleasingly puzzling conclusion, immersive sound design. On a story level it’s modest, but deceptively so, I think. Straightforward scenario, characterization and backstory conveyed simply, 85 minute running time, no muss no fuss. But it left me wondering about its world and what to make of what goes down. It has more corners and crevices to explore than at first glance. I liked it.

P.S.

SPECIAL SPOILER SECTION. My favorite part of the movie is the little scene where she almost gets run over by a guy in a truck, and he speaks to her. She seems like she’s maybe never heard anyone talk before, and he definitely doesn’t seem to expect to run into non-speakers. They have this strange encounter where he drives her and tries to talk to her. He’s not speaking English and it’s not sub-titled so I don’t exactly understand him either, but it still feels like a relief that somebody is talking. Weaving is amazing staring at him with confused fascination and occasionally trying to gesture. Then he turns on his car stereo and we realize she may never have heard music before either.

He gets a kick out of her reaction, especially when she starts to slightly nod her head to the beat. It’s (SPOILER WITHIN A SPOILER) one of those moments of joy that happens in stories like this and gets our guard down before it’s abruptly interrupted by tragedy, but shit. It was still a moment of joy in the middle of this thing. We had it for a moment.