Movie Review: Apostle

Apostle *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Gareth Evans.

Written by: Gareth Evans.

Starring: Dan Stevens (Thomas Richardson), Kristine Froseth (Ffion), Lucy Boynton (Andrea), Michael Sheen (Prophet Malcolm), Bill Milner (Jeremy), Mark Lewis Jones (Quinn), Elen Rhys (Jennifer), Paul Higgins (Frank), Annes Elwy (Sinead), Ross O'Hennessy (John the suspicious one), Ioan Hefin (Bell ringer), Richard Elfyn (Charles), Sebastian McCheyne (The Grinder).

 

Gareth Evans’ Apostle is one of the strangest horror films of the year – a film that starts out unsettling, and then moves into full on carnage in its second hour. That the film is too long is a given – so was Evans’ last feature, The Raid 2 – his ambitious sequel to his straight forward cops invading office building debut The Raid – but your kind of have to admire Evans for sticking to his vision so intently. The film doesn’t always work, but it always feels like an original, daring piece of work.

 

It’s 1905, and Thomas (Dan Stevens) has returned to his father for the first time in years, only to discover that his sister, Jennifer (Elen Rhys) has been kidnapped, and is being held hostage on a remote island, populated entirely by a religious cult run by Prophet Malcolm (Martin Sheen). The cult has demanded money for Thomas’ wealthy father, but the old man has been broken by this news – and wants to ensure he will actually get his daughter back. Thomas travels to the island undercover, with a bunch of new recruits, to try and figure out what is going on – and to save his sister. Over the course of the movie, we’ll find out a lot of surprising things about not only the cult, but about Thomas himself.

 

The first hour of the movie is a slow burn, as Thomas tries to get the lay of the land, and figure out just what exactly is going on. The cult has become desperate – their crops are failing, and they will soon starve if they cannot figure out what is going wrong right now – or at least get that money for Jennifer, to sustain them. The cult has started to eat each other from the inside out – the three most senior members, Malcolm, Frank (Paul Higgins) and Quinn (Mark Lewis Jones) – are barely holding it together. Each of them have a child on the island with them – and they too are holding onto secrets that could explode the whole thing. Thomas is able to sense this uneasiness, and take advantage of it – but that’s before the true nature of the cult becomes apparent, and it’s not quite like other cults.

 

It’s clear here what Evans’ inspiration for this film is – mainly The Wicker Man, another film about an outsider who gets inside of a cult, and gets more than he bargained for. Evans draws this out more than – the first half slowly revealing how perverse everything is, the second half falling into blood and viscera, as everything comes crashing down. Evans draws some good performances out of his cast – Stevens perhaps gives the game away a little too early, as he seems crazed from the start, but he does this sort of thing well. Sheen is quite good as the smiling cult leader, betraying something darker – although nowhere near as dark as what Mark Lewis Jones’ Quinn is hiding. This helps as the films second half keeps going deeper and deeper into depravity.

 

Is Apostle too long? Sure – there is a reason most horror movies top out around the 90-minute mark, and this one goes on for 130 minutes. And yet, Evans uses that time wisely – to build the tension more, to drop us deeper into the decay of it all. Yes, he goes on too long, but I think a 90 minute films wouldn’t quite get to the depths he’s aiming for. And more importantly, the extra length makes the film feel more authentic – less a product of a machine designed to churn out horror films, and more the work of an individual. Yes, its overindulgent, but here at least, that’s better than not being indulgent enough.

 

I was also impressed at how completely Evans seems to be want to make something different than what he has done before. Yes, The Raid, The Raid 2 and now Apostle are all brutally violent – but they are violent in a different way. If Evans’ real goal here was to show he wasn’t a one trick pony, then mission accomplished.