Revealer (2022)

directed by Luke Boyce

USA

86 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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The thing that drew me to this movie is also probably the least relevant part of it as a whole: I like the idea of the (or "an") apocalypse happening sometime in the past. It's interesting to imagine how people during a different era would react to the end of the world. In this case, the apocalypse takes place in the late 1980s, at a place and time where preachy picketers and the sex trade are colliding. Sally is a particularly outspoken member of a group that regularly shouts and waves signs outside Revealer, the naughty bookstore where Angie works as a peep show dancer. On one morning not much different from any other morning, the apparent Biblical apocalypse suddenly begins, and the two very different women get trapped in the booths together as the world turns itself inside out outside. We're never shown any scenes of mass chaos, but that's not necessary in this situation because we have Sally's expert knowledge of exactly how Judgement Day was forecasted to go down, and everything that's written in the Bible about it is scary enough without a visual depiction. There is some gore and demons and whatnot, of course, but leaving the worst of the tribulations to a viewer's imagination is usually the right call with this kind of thing.

Before I get any further into talking about the movie itself, I wanted to talk about a point it brings up that I thought was really interesting and that I probably won't be able to explain well. Revealer doesn't try to alter the popular conception of sin and sinners, but instead uses it to conjure some very frightening implications. It becomes pretty clear that even though the message of the film is about not judging people and not thinking you're better than them because of your faith, the apocalypse is happening along the lines of the gospel according to Sally the holier-than-thou picketer. People literally are getting punished for being "harlots" and "sexual deviants". But the film still posits that being those things isn't bad. No, instead it takes this almost Gnostic view of the Christian God as an antagonistic, borderline negative force; whether you've been shamelessly flaunting your body for a living or devoting yourself completely to God (while hiding a secret that he deems "sinful"), you have the same chance of getting raptured - or not. The scenario that unfolds here is not terrifying because of the idea that we might not have been good enough, it's terrifying because the whole idea of "good" according to this specific rapture leaves out countless scores of people who are kind, lovely, and righteous people. It's terrifying because we suddenly realize that God is judging humanity by a metric that has absolutely nothing to do with who we are at heart and is, in fact, almost wholly unknowable.

Revealer doesn't even get that far explicitly; there's no outright discussion of who's getting raptured and who's left behind, but the vitriol that is spewed by the creatures who are loosed on the earth while God presumably just turns his back and lets it all happen proves that religion in this case operates on an idea of good and bad that does not spell redemption for much of humankind, if any.

Moving on. I guess it wasn't necessary for this to take place in 1987, as this kind of misdirected woman-against-woman hate has been going on for a long time, but saying that it wasn't necessary is kind of like saying that it wasn't necessary for a great artist to use red - when it comes to art, "necessary" isn't a productive idea. And this movie uses its '80s setting as an excuse to indulge in neon and garish outfits, which all looks great. I wish there'd been a little more meat to the soundtrack, because the one song it does feature is really good, but that's not the biggest deal. The acting seems to have turned a lot of people off, judging by reviews, and it did turn me off a little at first too. The actress playing Sally at times feels kind of stiff and overly rehearsed, but the more of the film I watched, the more I felt like her awkwardness fit well with her character, who is meant to be an awkward person.

This is one of those movies where you mostly know where it's going in terms of how the two characters are ultimately going to bond with each other, but there's nothing wrong with that and in fact if it hadn't gone down that path I would have been disappointed. You know they're going to become close despite their differences and that there's gonna be some gay stuff (okay, maybe you don't know that, but you hope it) and it doesn't feel trite when all that does happen, it just feels like it's going the way it should. Aside from its fairly unique idea that what should be a reward day for all the holiest people in the world actually sucks really bad, there's not too much depth to this, but it's still a very solid film. Unfortunate how blatantly it succumbs to the "black guy dies first" rule, especially when there's not a lot in the way of onscreen death, making it more like "only the black guy dies".

Not much else to say about this. It is an interesting scenario executed well and with some good (though sparse) practical effects here and there. For some reason, this almost felt like an episode of Into the Dark or some other one-off anthology segment expanded into a feature film.