I’d like to propose a new horror subgenre: “Fool’s prestige”. It refers to films that are made and marketed in clear imitation of prestige horror films, competently made enough and with a clever enough premise to look like prestige horror at first blush. Unfortunately, these are films made with a much greater emphasis on crafting a specific mood, rather than telling a coherent story or exploring intelligent themes. The end result is that you feel spooked out and highbrow while sitting through the films, but you feel shallow and stupid while trying after the fact to describe what the movie is actually about.

You want examples? Just from this year, I could list off I.S.S., Spaceman, Kinds of Kindness, The Watcher, Trap, Civil War, Skincare, Oddity, The Strangers: Chapter One, and of course Longlegs. And anyone less generous might throw Strange Darling and I Saw the TV Glow onto the pile as well.

Azrael comes to us from screenwriter/producer Simon Barrett, one of many horror filmmakers who came up from the V/H/S franchise. He’s primarily well-known for his collaborations with Adam Wingard, who… *checks IMDb* had nothing whatsoever to do with this picture. Huh. Instead, the film was directed by E.L. Katz, here making his feature debut. That might’ve been the first and biggest mistake.

Anyway, the first and most important thing to know about Azrael is that there’s virtually no spoken dialogue. The entire cast (with one minor exception, more on him later) goes through the entire movie without trading a single word. No talking, no writing, no sign language, freaking zip.

To be clear, the notion of an entire movie without talking isn’t exactly a new concept. A Quiet Place is quite famously a franchise built entirely around characters who have to stay deathly silent. But even then, those movies are built around a strong family ensemble dynamic between characters who speak fluently without sound. I could also point to Silent Night (2023), which did occasionally cheat on the “no dialogue” rule while also compensating for the lack of dialogue with threadbare plotting and casual racism.

Sadly, Azrael falls into many of the same pitfalls as those other two. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me do my best to describe the plot as best I can with what the film gave me.

We lay our scene in some random forest after the apocalypse. The interspersed Bible passages strongly imply that this is all taking place after the Rapture and those left behind were struck mute to atone for their sins or some shit. I hasten to add that the production design implies that the world ended some time ago, yet there are still quite a few cars running on copious fuel and plenty of guns loaded with copious ammo.

And as long as I’m on this tangent, I’ve got to bring up Peter Christoffersen, here playing the one and only character who can actually speak (incomprehensible gibberish, but still), he’s got access to modern technology, and he shows knowledge of pop culture. This one character is so radically unlike any other character in this movie that it raises hundreds of questions about who this guy is and where he came from. And just as soon as it looks we’re getting answers, the character gets killed off. And the movie keeps going like he was never there at all. The goddamn abysmal world-building in this movie, sweet mercy…

Anyway, Samara Weaving plays our protagonist, who was simply minding her own business with a love interest (played by Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) before they’re both abducted by our antagonists. It seems that the woods are overrun by demons and our antagonists (with Vic Carmen Stone and Katariina Unt playing their leaders) are in the practice of capturing outsiders to sacrifice to the demons. Presumably so the demons will leave their commune alone, but that’s just my guess.

The bottom line is that our heroine escapes and the villains are dead fucking set on making sure she dies in the forest. While our protagonist only wants to rescue and/or avenge her boyfriend. And we’re off to the races.

Oh, and I expect you want to know more about the monsters. Basically put, they act like zombies and they look like people who’ve been burnt to a crisp. By all appearances, they can’t really see or hear anything and their only reliable sense is their nose for blood. In literally any other horror movie, these would be the lamest and most ineffectual monsters ever. But in a post-apocalyptic setting against characters who’ve more or less been sent back to pre-industrial times, they’re enough to do the trick.

More importantly, because these monsters are innately drawn to blood, it calls more attention to the condition of our lead character and her opponents. Every gunshot wound, every cut, every stab, every broken bone is made progressively worse with the knowledge that it could act as a dinner bell for any nearby demons. It highlights the characters’ vulnerability in ways that make the action and the horror far more engaging. Quite clever.

Oh, and the chase scenes are loaded with neat little touches throughout. To point out my favorite example, you know that godawful trope in which the main character is running through the forest only to get tripped up and fall on the ground? In this movie, our main character jumps over the tripping hazard and the demon falls over behind her. Freaking genius.

Of course, it certainly helps that we’ve got a lead character played by such a battle-hardened world-class Final Girl as Samara Weaving. She’s expressive enough and strong enough to carry an entire film without a word spoken, and I’m pleasantly astounded to see her come that far as an actor. She’s easily the best reason to see this movie, though she’s surrounded by quite a few actors who are effectively carrying their weight.

Unfortunately, the lack of spoken dialogue — or writing or signing or any kind of exposition at all — comes back to bite the movie hard in the third act. When the time finally came for the big climactic reveal, I could only wonder what in the nine hells I was looking at. What just happened? Why did it happen? What was accomplished? What was the point to any of this?

Seriously, A Quiet Place and its two accompanying films used its silent conceit as a means to explore themes of grief and connection and communication. And for all my problems with Silent Night, it was still a standard revenge story about a man who gave up his own life and all the happiness he might’ve had in exchange for bloody vengeance. But with Azrael… I got nothing. If there’s any kind of deeper statement here, or any deeper meaning to the silent gimmick, or any kind of point to all this, it’s lost on me.

At 85 minutes long, Azrael barely even counts as a feature length movie. If the film had been cut to under an hour and kept an experimental short film, we all might’ve been better off. Sure, it’s creepy and bloody and spooky, and it’s great to see Samara Weaving acting her ass off, but there’s no point or purpose to any of this. Without dialogue, we’re stuck with shitty world-building, incoherent themes, and an opaque story run by characters with no clear motivation. (Seriously, the apocalypse is done. The Rapture literally came and went. With all due respect, what do you have left to live for that you’d fight this hard to stay alive?)

But the sad thing is that even if this movie had dialogue, the fight scenes and scares and general feeling of creepy suspense aren’t good enough to make up for the loss of that central gimmick. As with so many “fool’s prestige” movies, this one only feels like an audition for the director to make some other, better movie. Sorry, but I can’t recommend this one.