Apostle (2018)

After The Raid movies I would see anything writer/director Gareth Evans puts out. It turns out he wanted to try horror next, but not just any horror, a visceral period piece filled with existential dread. Apostle follows a man already on the edge emotionally setting out to save his sister from a cult but it grows beyond that simple, somewhat done, premise to become something extraordinary both in its intensity (this is a film that doesn't pull punches) and its ambiguity (morality is shattered here).

Evans has a strength in making the violence in his films palpable. It isn't dismissive sort of violence. His audience feels each punch, and puncture, each death. With Apostle he ramps that up. The second half of the film can be terribly hard to watch. He doesn't let his audience of the hook. If you're going to watch a violent film you're going to feel it and it's going to hurt.

But the horror in this film isn't limited to the graphic nature of it. Apostle is disconcerting from the get go. This is a story of a cult. It's about how minds are manipulated, people controlled, and how power stems from that. But as the film goes on we learn more about what's happening here. It isn't just about a charismatic dictator. It's about the power he is battling to control and the power struggles which ensue over that. Apostle speaks to mankind's (specifically male) exploitation and failure to manage mother earth. How the battle for dominion over all things female including our feminization of nature poisons us and turns us into monsters.

Apostle is brutal, not just visually, but morally. It isn't very forgiving of its subjects or its audience. It is, as the best horror is, somewhat of an indictment of who we are, showing us how ugly we can be, and the true terror comes in seeing ourselves reflected back in that evil.

Apostle
Starring: Dan Stevens, Michael Sheen, Lucy Boynton, Mark Lewis-Jones, Paul Higgins, Bill Milner, Kristine Froseth, Sharon Morgan
Writer/Director: Gareth Evans