thank fuck organised religious cults are only in fiction

what is it with white people in rural areas forming religious horror cults all the damn time?

The moments of physical action in this will have you drooling for what begs to be THE RAID meets THE WICKER MAN, but Evans is way more interested in a (very) slow to roll cult thriller. Extra points for not stringing you along with a "what's really going on here?" tease; this is very up-front even if it's 20 minutes too long. Anyway Evans can shoot the shit out of anything and this gets suitably gnarly when it counts.

beware of false prophets which come to you in Sheen's clothing

First hour is kind of rough, with lots of cliché characterization and ugly desaturated, handheld camera work (with no clear indication why it's been shot this way until the last like 30m), but this hugely picks up around the time it goes full The Blood on Satan's Claw supernatural cult horror an hour in and then for some ungodly reason caps the whole thing off with 30m of "what if Witchfinder General was a torture porn movie?" Unsure whether this is Actually Good or not but the bizarre whiplash of witnessing Evans' paranoid, untethered photography and penchant for bonkers gruesomeness infect a 70s British folk horror locale in that finale was enough to get my lizard brain going and forget all the times actors opened their mouths in this. Gotta be some value in that, right?

how could they give.... dan stevens.... an audiobook narrator.... like..... three lines... in his own movie... i just want to listen to his sexy voice shut up

it’s a testament to dan stevens’ hotness that even when he was covered in blood and swimming through sewage I was still horned

ok but what if........you just kept your religion to yourself

I thought for the first hour that this might not get all that gross and gnarly and then I realized I should never underestimate Gareth Evans.

I’m a big fan of slow, brooding, boring, period piece folk horror—rotting soil, vine blood goddess, Dan Stevens, bursts of violence, and an intense third act that sees Mark Lewis Jones channeling gonzo Oliver Reed.

I didn’t really care for either Raid movies, loved by many and that’s awesome, but this is way more my speed... I would have gone even higher but it was a tad long, even for me, purveyor of overlong slogs, but at least it didn’t put me to sleep like Hold the Dark did. When it comes down to it cults and a town covered in vines is just appealing to me? I dunno, I dug it.

I’ll gladly add this to my Folk Horror list.

who ever wrote this really wants to work for a24

"She’s just a machine: you feed her, and she delivers."

Apostle is straight-up Marxist critique of ideology. Mother Earth is the ultimate symbol of the means of production—she makes the earth produce life—and here she's a prisoner, held captive and perverted to serve the cult's purposes, laying bare the price of this society. Ideology once brought this community together, but now it's rotten. Exploitation of the disenfranchised so that the successful may flourish

2018