Apostle (2018)

Gareth Evans, who previously spent his energies watching men kick each other through drywall in Jakarta, turns his attention to the damp and the devout. Apostle arrives in 1905, on a Welsh island where the soil is fed by blood and the congregation is led by Michael Sheen in a beard of genuine commitment. Dan Stevens plays Thomas, a former missionary who lost his faith in Peking and now must retrieve his sister from a cult that has misplaced its moral compass entirely. The film is patient, grim, and soaked through. It offers no comfort and requests none.

The curious thing about this sort of picture is how thoroughly it ignores the present moment. The casting makes no gesture toward representation, the romance is a heterosexual tryst in a field, and the forced abortion, staged with real unpleasantness, is horror instead of argument. The island is barren because a goddess is imprisoned beneath a barn, not because of carbon emissions. The cult's economy of ransom and sacrifice is a plot engine, not a parable about late capitalism. The violence is grisly and bodies are handled as meat, which is the opposite of a body-positive message. Nobody here is neurodivergent, unless we count the man who grinds corpses for a living, and we should not. The history is invented wholesale and no lesson is drawn from it.

The film, for its part, simply tells its story. The camera watches, the congregation chants, and the audience is left to conclude whatever it likes. Sermons are aimed at the villagers, not at us, which is a different thing entirely and much easier to sit through. We are handed a folk horror of real craft and no agenda beyond dread. On the ledger of contemporary social instruction, the entry is blank. The sommelier sets down the glass and nods. Nothing in this vintage has been fortified.