Samara Weaving in a High-Concept Horror Flick

Take ingredients from successful post-apocalyptic narratives like The Last of Us and A Quiet Place, toss them into a cauldron, add some vague references to Satan, pour in several buckets of blood, boil at a high temperature while stirring frequently, and you’ll wind up with a strange brew that tastes like the new high-concept horror flick, Azrael.

Picked up by Paramount Global’s resurrected distribution arm, Republic Pictures — which once released movies like Orson Welles’ Macbeth and John Ford’s The Quiet Man — this familiar if well-executed genre programmer dishes out enough gory thrills to attract some eyeballs on streaming. It premieres in SXSW’s Midnighters sidebar.

Directed by E.L. Katz (Small Crimes) from a script by Simon Barrett (You’re Next), two vets of the horror game, the film checks all the requisite boxes — a beautiful heroine on the run, flesh-eating zombies (or zombie-like creatures), twisted Biblical symbolism, multiple decapitations — without necessarily bringing anything new to the table. The movie’s one major innovation, which is that none of the characters speak, has already been a staple of the genre for years, with franchises like A Quiet Place and Don’t Breathe exploiting the concept to the max.

That doesn’t mean Azrael isn’t fun to watch at times, especially if you like your horror movies to be gory, muddy and devoid of any deeper meaning. Katz and Barrett know how to deliver nonstop action: Their film hits the ground running and doesn’t let up for a compact 85 minutes marked by a few standout set pieces, especially a nighttime ride in a jeep that quickly goes south. But without much of a story, and with characters of zero-to-little substance, the bloodshed becomes tedious before we even get to the big final twist.

To justify the film’s wordless narrative, an opening title card explains that speech has been outlawed ever since the “Rapture,” which we assume to be some kind of apocalypse, occurred many years earlier. Humans have been left to wander a dark forest populated by bloodsucking humanoids who, as the title suggests, have some connection to the angel of death from Christian lore — a theory compounded by the primitive frescoes we see painted inside an old church run by a creepy priestess (Vic Carmen Sonne).

Trying to stay alive amid all the mayhem is the titular heroine, Azrael (Samara Weaving), whom we first meet frolicking with a sort of boyfriend (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) in the woods. They’re immediately hunted down by a pack of monk-like henchmen who tie the girl up and try to sacrifice her to one of the forest’s hemoglobin-drinking monsters.

But Azrael manages to escape — which she does in nearly every scene — making her way to a small community that lives in Mad Max-style abandon among barbed wire and rusted old automobiles (they also somehow have access to rechargeable LED lanterns). Those folks are all out to get Azrael as well, prompting the poor girl to keep escaping until she can escape no more.

Since nobody ever mutters a word (except for one sequence where a guy suddenly speaks Esperanto) you never learn much about Azrael or anyone else, which means you don’t necessarily care when the zombies occasionally rip their heads off and suck the blood out of them, like they’re gulping down Slurpees. Silence is both the film’s main asset and its principal limitation, creating moments of suspense but also leaving us in the dark, to the point that it feels more like a gimmick than anything substantial.

Katz has a talent for staging fight and chase sequences, which is basically all that happens here, teaming up with Estonian DP Mart Taniel (Captain Volkonogov Escaped) to get plenty of visual mileage out of a $12-million budget. The forest setting nonetheless feels a tad redundant — not unlike the plot itself — and Azrael could have benefited from more variety all around, although the score by Toti Gudnason (Lamb) and the Blair brothers (The Toxic Avenger) manages to keep the vibe pulsing.

Weaving gives an intense and taxing physical performance that requires her to run around a lot, or else to scream her lungs out without making any noise whatsoever. It looks totally exhausting, and by the time the movie ends and Azrael finally comes into her own, we’re pretty exhausted as well.