Apostle (2018)

directed by Gareth Evans
UK, USA
130 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Netflix put this up at precisely the right time, because although it's been October for two weeks now, the weather where I live has only just begun to get really chilly, and for me personally, that's what signals the start of Halloween.

My first impression of the film was that Dan Stevens is really good. My second impression was that Dan Stevens is really good. He blends perfectly into this period piece from the very early 1900s. The cinematography and setup of the whole film is perfect- it looks unshowy, hand-cobbled; realistically dirty and full of smoke and soot. 1905 doesn't seem like that long ago until you realize that it actually was. The music is also a huge part of why I was so pulled in by the atmosphere. That tune that plays in the tavern towards the beginning was a straight up "put a fire in your blood" type thing and maybe it was a little more modern than the setting required but it sounded amazing.

So many small atrocities happen throughout the course of Apostle that I was expecting them all to eventually build to some singular, horrific finale that would outdo everything, but this isn't necessarily the case. The bad things keep coming with no significant increase in ferocity, except towards the end. Some scenes are more extensive and traumatic than others, but practically every moment is an enforcement of the wrongness of the environment. As a cult film it doesn't even make a particular effort to put on the whole "This is a utopian paradise where we definitely don't kill people" thing most cult leaders try to do, it starts right out with burning books, and really, no good has ever come of an organization asking people to burn their (regular, non-offensive) books. Of note is that the name "Eris" is also the name of an ancient Greek goddess of strife and discord. Erisden, Eris' Den.

The only thing I wasn't fond of was the insertion of a romantic subplot about forbidden love between two young people within the cult, and even this I'm reluctant to criticize because I did think it was done well. It's just the kind of thing I wasn't expecting to see in a movie this brutal. The relationship itself ends in brutality, which made me feel like the only reason it was there in the first place was so it could all go horribly wrong- I didn't see another ending to it right from when it was introduced. Also, I didn't like that this used typical ~*exotic*~ Orientalism in the protag's backstory- you can tell a lot about a film by who it chooses to subtitle, and in this case the few Chinese lines are not deemed significant enough for us to know what they mean beyond that they're supposed to be menacing.

I've been so used to watching hour-and-a-half films that something this long took me a bit to adjust to. It's like one long exhale, it gives itself time to develop, unfurl, and reveal more and more terrible things instead of rushing to get it all out in a structured beginning-middle-end (though it does have that too). Some of the CGI felt out-of-place and I think at times it could have benefited from a "less is more" philosophy, but on the whole, this is one of the top horror movies I've seen this year.