REVIEW: AZRAEL (2024) dir. E.L. Katz

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” opens the Gospel of John. Azrael, the American-Estonian co-production from E.L. Katz via Shudder, adulterates that famous literary opening and flips it upside down. The rapture took place — a zealous Evangelical belief that at Christ’s second coming, all Christians will be snapped away Thanos-style and taken to God while non-Christians will undergo a period of intense tribulations (the timeline of these events is as debated as “pop” vs. “soda”) — and a cultic community of votive mutes runs things now. The tongue urges sin, so they naturally remove the ability to speak from unwilling sinners (and leave scars in the shape of crosses on one’s neck in the process). You read that right: Azrael takes place in a post-rapture society. Oh, and there are burnt cannibalistic monsters and human sacrifices.

The religious allusions go deep (as the name of the film alludes). There’s even a scene in which Azrael (Samara Weaving) rises victorious out of a hole in the ground. She meets a man, the only speaking person in the film, seemingly from nowhere, who talks to her in a tongue she doesn’t seem to understand and dies to commence the third act. The man might be more John the Baptist than the Baptist himself. The wendigo-zombies hunt the humans like the Pharisees in John. There is even a Black man (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), Azrael’s partner, nailed through the palms of his hands to a tree. The image could have provoked ingenious symbolism by bridging the cross and the lynching tree but is forsaken in actuality since the filmmakers appeared unaware of that potential.

Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.