In every movie she’s in, Samara Weaving is the chick you don’t want to f*ck with. She’s the killer you didn’t see coming, the badass you wouldn’t expect, and that’s what makes her so perfect for the revenge thriller. It’s also what makes her the driving engine behind Azrael, in which Weaving plays a silent force of nature tearing through a post-apocalyptic landscape littered with cultists and zombies.
Azrael, which appears to be the name of Weaving’s deadly protagonist, begins with blood-red text telling us of the setting: 100 years after “The Rapture”. After that Biblical event, the world’s human population was severely reduced, and many of those left have divided into individual cults. One such group has renounced the sin of spoken language, and Weaving’s character is one. They have the crucifix-like scars on their necks to prove their devotion. When we meet her, she’s scrounging through the woods with her lover (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) in dirty clothes, clearly having fled from those radicals. But they are captured anyway, separated, and she is tied to a chair and cut so that the blood attracts what appears to be a zombie that has been out cooking in the sun too long.
But is it really a zombie? Or the remains of a different religious sect? The aggravating thing about Azrael is that its lack of dialogue is both a gift and a curse. Weaving’s character barely escapes becoming a human buffet course, and then finds herself on the run from cultists who attack with all sorts of rudimentary weapons and skillfully-laid traps. She fights, gets away, but is always left bleeding just enough to attract the “undead” who are constantly on her trail, too. It’s a repetitive cycle but an entertaining one, as a wordless Weaving in constant fight-or-flight mode is pretty awesome to watch. In one vicious battle, she desperately cleaves through another woman’s neck with her teeth. In another, a gun-toting extremist finds his head separated from his shoulders. And this is just the beginning as Weaving finds herself covered in blood throughout, which should make this a Midnight favorite to a lot of her fans.
The script was penned by Simon Barrett, best known for genre-favorite films such as The Guest and You’re Next. However, the sparse screenplay offers few details about the brutal world Azrael is fighting so hard to get away from. Why did this group decide to go silent? Why is Azrael so special that she needs to be sacrificed when others are outright killed? And what’s up with the weird pregnant lady (Vic Carmen Stone) in the church and her connection to the savage outsiders? If you allow yourself to get bogged down in questions, Azrael will prove a frustrating experience. Do yourself a favor, though, and just sit back and watch Samara Weaving at her ferocious best. Then it’ll all be worth it.
Azrael is open in select theaters on September 27th via IFC Films.
