The fact that Azrael is described in some places as an action horror should be enough to get the makers in trouble with the Trade Descriptions Act. There's no decent action, and there's also a distinct lack of any horror. There's a decent end scene, but it's a punchline that isn't even worth the relatively meagre 86 minutes that you have to waste on the full runtime.
Things start off with a bit of text explaining that the movie is set years after the Rapture. Yes, THAT Rapture. Many of those left behind believe that speech is a sin, which leads to them trying to live in relative silence. That should also help them avoid some demonic creatures that try to hunt and eat them. One person trying to avoid such a fate is Azrael (Samara Weaving).
I was going to try and add some more detail there, give you something to at least pique your curiosity, but I can't. This film gives viewers nothing, and then continues to deliver a whole lot of extra nothing throughout. It's bad in a way that is hard to understand, because it feels like someone had to continually make one bad decision after another, all the way to just before the end credits.
I guess the person to get most of the blame is writer Simon Barrett. Barrett is someone who has written some fantastic films, but he's also done his share of some not-so-fantastic films. His other not-so-fantastic films are easier to understand though, often making use of too much CGI or too many jump scares in ways that epitomise the worst habits of modern movie-making. This is another level, however, with a lack of detail, an apparent lack of logic (at times), and nothing to truly reward viewers who read that opening text, shrug, and decide to go along with the ridiculousness of the central conceit.
Maybe, and it's a very big maybe, things would have been easier to go along with if director E. L. Katz had been able to present the material in a way that was more entertaining and distracting. Katz has made a couple of fill features before this, and has been involved with a few decent horror genre TV shows, which explains why this doesn't even have the accidental positive of laughable incompetence. A complete newcomer may have failed with more amusing results, or even succeeded beyond anything they could comprehend, whereas someone with more experience would know to either stay away from the script or change whatever needed changing to give it even half a chance to work.
Weaving can't do anything much to help. As good an actress as she is, she's dragged down into the mud here by the script. Her character isn't ever someone we get to know, aside from her will to survive, and she's only worth rooting for, I guess, because she's Samara Weaving. I understand that Barrett probably wanted to challenge himself, and cinema is predominantly a visual medium, but making the central character such a blank page (perhaps literally) does nobody any favours.
I didn't like Azrael, I know that I have made that much clear, but I want to underline how angry it made me. I resent the fact that I watched this bloody thing, which limped along from one stupid and improbable moment to the next, without the feeling of anyone involved having ever once pushed aside their own sense of smugness to make an effort to draw people into the world and premise depicted onscreen.
2/10
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