After the rapture, the world has fallen into darkness.  A sect has formed that has taken to a vow of silence, going so far as to sever their vocal cords.  Outside of their compound, the “burned ones,” humanoid demons who prey on those who survived the apocalypse are on endless prowl.  Azrael (Samara Weaving) and her partner, Kenan (Nathan Steward-Jarrett), have been excommunicated from the religion and are set to be offered to the burned ones as a final punishment.  Azrael escapes her captures, though, and seeks to have her vengeance on the community that has scorned her. 

E.L. Katz directs Azrael, a near-wordless film from a surely margin-brustling script penned by Simon Barrett.  The film premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival among other more genre-friendly spring festivals before being acquired by IFC Films in the summer.  It received an early fall theatrical release ahead of its bow on Shudder where the 86-minute film will find its widest audience. 

Azrael is a hard sell given the wordless conceit, but it finds refuge in the horror genre which is often friendlier to these more avant-garde approaches to filmmaking without all of the black-and-white, French pretension which that term often insinuates.  Through the tireless effort of Carlos Lazlo’s production design and especially Anna-Liisa Liiver’s set decoration, the world of Azrael feels wholly realized given what we see on screen, but the narrative never quite shakes the feeling that it is the product of an extended screenwriting exercise.  It is a shame because there is so much thought and care that goes into the world of the film, but audiences do not get a real sense of the ins and outs of the lore.  There is so much going on, but the story has no other choice than to simplify itself as it clings to its wordlessness so we never get to explore it as much as we would like. Even things as basic as character names are not revealed until the rolling of the end credits; and when seen at home on streaming, that will be relegated to a small picture-in-picture thumbnail while the algorithm casts out another lure. 

Many of these great images are playing on religious themes and iconography so that audiences, even the un-devout, will be able to fill in some of the gaps with their own outside understanding of organized religion.  Early in the film when the practitioners are calling the burned ones to claim Azrael, they are, for lack of a better word, chanting through rhythmic exhales increasing in volume and ferocity as the ritual continues.  Later, back at the church, this sound is repeated as the wind from the outside passes through a small hole in the wall.  We connect these sounds together; the tambe of the breeze almost certainly having been the only sounds the founding members of this new faith would have heard as they huddled in the walls of the church in silence during the rapture.  There just are not enough of these connections made throughout the narrative to fill in the world and make us understand who we are rooting for, especially in the end. 

Azreal plays with a lot of biblical themes, but it has a strange way of applying the apocryphal text to the world of the film in a way that audiences can understand more fully the consequences of the action.  Azreal, as a figure beyond the film, is an angel of death detailed in Revelation of Peter which details one account of the rising of the dead and the second coming of Christ. In the film, applying that interpretation, those who are left behind would presumably be the sinners in the eyes of the god that wrought the destruction, and while we understand that Azreal is our heroine given her framing in Mart Taniel’s lens and her prominence in almost every scene, the motivations of the sect are more deeply understood through press notes than the actual action of the film.  This lack of clarity really weakens the final act which continues the trend of demonic babies in 2024, but as Azrael holds this strange child with the light of the moon and fire from a blown-out stained glass creating a halo around her head – a gorgeous shot, for sure – we find ourselves still reeling from the action that came before and struggling to reconcile all which we have seen against what little we know in context of the film, and what we know from what we brought in with us. 

It is a moment of rare slowness in the film that otherwise moves at a rather frantic pace so as to keep our minds of those who caught the film in cinemas from wandering too far, or at home where it must keep our eyes from scrolling through a second screen.  The action boils over with incredible fashion in the final act, but getting there, even across the film’s brief runtime, is no easy task.  Azarel can be classified more closely to an action film than a horror film, albeit one that draws heavily from the well of horror imagery.  Katz lets loose and unleashes an endless torrent upon Azeral who spends much of the film getting beaten and broken without mercy, taking hit after hit, never making a sound from the pain, and shaking it off to carry on within seconds of the last attack.  Incredibly elastic bodies are a dime a dozen in both action and horror films, but the problem here is that outside of the church, the script has established a rather grounded and unutilized post-apocalyptic world so her resilience stretches far beyond the shot of adrenaline needed to survive and breaks our immersion with the story.  Again, the story is one that lacks consequence. 

Azrael still presents an interesting enough tale to justify itself, though it will leave general audiences and horror heads wanting more.  We are teased at a much more intricate narrative that never quite forms given Barrett’s adherence to his own self-imposed rules.  It becomes truly frustrating because while most of the set pieces do not require dialogue, the minutiae between them absolutely do.  The few intertitles with ominous biblical experts help frame what is already known and do not deepen our understanding of what we are seeing, rather they just serve as lazy transitions which Barrett is not able to resolve because he does not allow his characters to speak. There is promise here, but it just is not enough to support a full feature-length film in the wordless form that it was presented.  That merit, though, helps salve the burn because this can be more kindly referred to as simply as a creative choice gone awry instead of the more nefarious gimmick. Simply put, Azrael will not attract as wide enough of an audience to have this choice seen in any kind of nefarious light, but those who do brave the world of the burned ones will still be able to walk away witnessing an incredible final act that, like the bellowing of angel’s trumpets, may signal something great and marvelous – and even terrifying – to come.