Azrael: Angel of Death review: Violent, vicious and visceral

E.L. Katz’s post-apocalyptic survival thriller pits a determined young woman against a cult community of believers

“Many years after the Rapture…” reads the text, in bright red, that opens Azrael: Angel of Death. It is a way, right from the outset of marking E.L. Katz’s feature, written by Simon Barrett, as being post-apocalyptic in an unusually literal sense, and of framing everything that follows in religious terms.
Indeed the first image that we see is the candle-lit interior of a church. Yet much as there is a prominent vulva-like fissure in the building’s wooden wall (spattered with blood, or is it red wax?), this postlapsarian church has become feminised, perhaps even perverted, with not just a matriarchal priestess (Vic Carmen Sonne) in place of the expected patriarchal pastor, but also one who is heavily pregnant. What is more, she presides over a protected community that engages in acts of human sacrifice and worse to stave off the dark forces of the forest that are circling from without and from within. These are desperate times where hope – even the hope invested in new birth – comes beleaguered by fear and superstition, and the writing, or at least the prophetic pictures that this priestess paints, are literally on the wall.

That initial text, and other interstitial titles written sporadically on screen, are the only (English-language) words that will appear in the film. For this besieged flock is not just post-apocalyptic, but post-verbal, having been “driven to renounce their sin of Speech” – and even though the characters in Azrael: Angel of Death still have access to rifles and cars, in other respects they have been returned to god-fearing, pre-modern times, even as the film looks back to the mute gestural performances of the silent movie. The only spoken words come from a stranger driving through (Peter Christofferson) in the night, and even if the locals can, or once could, understand English, he speaks only Spanish, as an emblem of the immense gulf between him and them. Not that the other characters are entirely silent – for they grunt and whistle and gasp and hiss with inarticulate abandon.

At the centre of Azrael: Angel of Death is a young fugitive woman (Samara Weaving) – designated Azrael in the closing credits, though naturally unnamed in the film itself. After being abducted, along with her lover (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), by locals (Eero Milonoff, Johhan Rosenberg, Katariina Unt) and left to be devoured by a woodland monster, she manages to escape, and then spends the rest of the film trying to find her beloved, to fight her way through threats from all sides, and ultimately to have her revenge. This plays out as a sylvan survival thriller, violent, vicious and visceral – but its religious subtext, there from the start, refuses to remain buried for long, and so imagery of crucifixion, resurrection and miraculous birth is here inverted like a cross, to create a triumphant testament of a newly risen Antichrist.

This bloody parable reveals a world turned to hell, and suggests that perhaps the best way to survive in it is to burn everything down and embrace the devil. It also gets us wondering whether the angelic heroine we have been rooting for may all along have been the demonic villainess – although, after the Rapture, does it even matter and is there any real difference? Answers – and allegiances – may depend on where exactly you stand on the divide between the sacred and the secular in today’s highly polarised America.

Azrael: Angel of Death had its UK première at FrightFest 2024, 25 August