Fantastic Fest review: Gareth Evans’ Apostle is a brutal, overstuffed period piece

After thrilling audiences with 2011’s martial arts blockbuster The Raid and its equally impressive 2014 sequel, director Gareth Evans has gone a very different route with Apostle. Evans’ first feature for Netflix is a slow-burning period piece that brings to mind religious cult films like The Wicker Man, albeit with a bit of the old ultra violence thrown in for good measure.

Set in 1905, the film stars Dan Stevens (forever cousin Matthew for the Downton Abbey heads) as Thomas Richardson, who poses as a follower of a religious sect in order to rescue his kidnapped sister. Once set up in the isolated community, Thomas has to contend with the group’s leader Malcolm (Michael Sheen), a self-proclaimed prophet who claims to help control the colony’s harvest through a series of creepy practices, including offering up jars of blood from each member of the community.

Subplots involving a pair of secretive teenage lovers and a challenge to Malcom’s authority on the island serve to deepen the world of the film, even as they often detract from Thomas’ mission to save his sister. Without delving into spoilers, suffice it to say that all is not as it seems on the island, and other, more sinister forces are also at play.

Apostle shows that Evans can move away from all-out action films and still create a tense, effective thriller. When the action does sporadically break out, the violence is even more jarring, shattering the relatively sedate world of the film with a spear through the face or a drill through someone’s brain.

While the film features some brutal action scenes and solid performances, overall it feels scattershot, despite its two-hour-plus running time. Evans throws together a TV season’s worth of characters and divergent plot points into one movie, which lends The Apostle a bit of a harried feel.

In many ways, this is a perfect fit for Netflix — it has a recognizable star, and is entertaining enough, in spite of its flaws. It may not reach the glorious thrill levels of The Raid, but Apostle shows that Evans can successfully move beyond strictly action fare, even if he can’t resist crafting a handful of crowd-pleasing kill shots. Overall, Apostle is a perfectly fine rainy day Netflix movie, but feels more like an experiment for Evans than the true next chapter in his career.

Apostle debuts on Netflix on October 12, 2018