EL Katz made a splash a decade ago at SXSW with the twisted “Cheap Thrills,” a film I really liked (and one of my first RogerEbert.com reviews, for the record), so I was excited to see him team up with the underrated Samara weaving “Azrael” a film that promised a bloody, post-apocalyptic thrill ride. Sadly, this is a big flop for Katz and Weaving, a film that joins a strange little subgenre of dialogue-free films of late, a sort of horror sister to John Woo's “Silent Night.” The problem is that when a film eschews all dialogue, it needs to compensate with strong visual language and narrative drive; This movie has neither.
Set years after the Rapture (yes, that one), speaking has been considered a sin in this future world with no supplies and dwindling humanity. Azrael (Weaving) wanders through the forest with a companion (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) and, although we do not dialogue, it is evident that they live in fear and hide. Before long, they are caught by a group of wandering marauders and Azrael is tied to a chair. A ceremony begins and what look almost like demons emerge from behind the trees, ready to chew human flesh. Azrael escapes her, but fate keeps bringing her back to the Marauders' camp, which anyone who's ever seen a movie knows he'll eventually take down.
A film like “Azrael” needs thematic density to overcome the lack of dialogue, and writer Simon Barrett probably knows his project well enough to think that exists, but it doesn't convey well to the audience. Instead, “Azrael” becomes a flat genre exercise, a series of poorly staged combat sequences and some truly creepy creatures that look like badly burned humanoids. Weaving is giving everything to “Azrael” consistently; There is simply nothing in return.
Director Kourtney Roy promised “rivers of snot” before her premiere “Kryptic” and that's really all this experimental glitch has to offer. Once again, the writer, Paul Bromley in this case, probably thinks there is a lot going on in this twisted story of a cryptozoologist in search of a monster and herself, but nothing substantial reaches the audience. I don't mind a movie that uses shocking imagery instead of straightforward narrative, but “Kryptic” isn't confident enough for either. It's like a student film: full of ideas, but none of them explain how to put a film together.
