Recently, there seems to be a trend among filmmakers who want to stretch their prowess and make a movie with as little dialogue as possible. Sometimes, it aids the film like with Dunkirk or A Quiet Place. In other cases, as an audience, we need something in the way of dialogue, or it makes the movie feel plodding. There’s a reason why they pushed for talkies so much when movies could have sound. It’s a nice idea to make a movie where you push the rule of “show, don’t tell.” However, in the case of Azrael, the film succeeds in making its heroine a character to root for, but it also fails at providing a narrative that the audience can invest in.

Azrael stars Samara Weaving as Azrael, Vic Carmen Sonne, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Eero Milonoff, Sebastian Bull, and Phong Giang. In the film, the world has gone silent, or at least parts of it have. After the biblical Rapture, those left on Earth are doomed to suffer in silence. Azrael and her boyfriend, Kenan (you won’t know these names unless you go to the IMDb page) are hunted by a cult to be sacrificed to an ancient evil in the wilderness. From there, Azrael escapes capture and is forced to fight to get Kenan back and escape once again. Along the way, we get to see the ancient evil, and it’s pretty terrifying. The monsters of the film live up to their disgusting billing.

The cult is pretty tame for cult standards; they’re led by a nun and another woman who try to hunt down Azrael. They’re fine enough antagonists, but they lack any bite because the whole movie is silent. The only words we hear are non-English when Azrael gets picked up by a wayward motorist. This scene throws many questions into the mix, because the guy is some average dude who enjoys rock music. Azrael can’t talk. Her throat has a cross-shaped scar on it. So it brings into question why she can’t speak. The film somewhat answers that in its climax, but not really.

Azrael‘s monsters, gore effects, and action are the film’s best parts. There are some genuinely crowd-pleasing moments, especially when the monsters get their hands on some cult members. It might have fared better if the whole film had an even tone, providing an action-horror vehicle for Samara Weaving. The moments where the film is exhilarating are padded out by moments that feel overly long. The third act feels like a different movie entirely because of all the gaps in the action.

Those moments of action aren’t enough to pull Azrael into really must-watch territory, though. For fans of Samara Weaving, she’s great. She pulls the whole thing along with her performance, including the reveal at the end. Outside of her, Eero Milonoff is particularly dastardly as one of the cult members, and he gets the best and most gruesome scene in the film.

Azrael really could have been something spectacular with the great monsters, gore, and Samara Weaving’s performance. It ends up laying down plenty of questions that compound into more questions by the end of it. There’s some commentary on religion mixed in here, but it’s surface-level stuff that doesn’t ever go deeper because of the lack of dialogue in the film. A meandering and padded out story doesn’t help things. Azrael feels like something that was destined to be a short film.

If you’re a superfan of Samara Weaving, this is worth a watch, but it’s neither frightening enough, action-packed enough, or interesting enough to rise above a single watch.

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