Popular reviews

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  Review by Jay ★★★½ 5

  hey hey thank fuck organised religious cults are only in fiction ha ha right *sweats*

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★½

  The moments of physical action in this will have you drooling for what begs to be THE RAID meets THE WICKER MAN, but Evans is way more interested in a (very) slow to roll cult thriller. Extra points for not stringing you along with a "what's really going on here?" tease; this is very up-front even if it's 20 minutes too long. Anyway Evans can shoot the shit out of anything and this gets suitably gnarly when it counts.

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  Review by josh lewis ★★★ 8

  first hour is kind of rough, lots of cliche characterization and ugly desaturated, handheld camera work (with no clear indication why its been shot this way until the last like 30m), but this hugely picks up around the time it goes full The Blood on Satan's Claw supernatural cult horror an hour in and then for some ungodly reason caps the whole thing off with 30m of "what if Witchfinder General was a torture porn movie?" unsure whether this is Actually Good or not but the bizarre whiplash of witnessing evans' paranoid, untethered photography and penchant for bonkers gruesomeness infect a 70s british folk horror locale in that finale was enough to get my lizard brain going and forget all the times actors opened their mouths in this. gotta be some value in that, right?

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  Review by iana ★★★ 6

  me: i just want the raid 3
  gareth evans: fuck you

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  Review by maria ★★★½ 2

  how could they give.... dan stevens.... an audiobook narrator.... like..... three lines... in his own movie... i just want to listen to his sexy voice shut up

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  Review by Lizzy ★★★★ 2

  what is it with white people in rural areas forming religious horror cults all the damn time?

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  Review by Ian West ★★★★ 8

  I’m a big fan of slow, brooding, boring, period piece folk horror—rotting soil, vine blood goddess, Dan Stevens, bursts of violence, and an intense third act that sees Mark Lewis Jones channeling gonzo Oliver Reed.

  I didn’t really care for either Raid movies, loved by many and that’s awesome, but this is way more my speed... I would have gone even higher but it was a tad long, even for me, purveyor of overlong slogs, but at least it didn’t put me to sleep like Hold the Dark did. When it comes down to it cults and a town covered in vines is just appealing to me? I dunno, I dug it.

  
  I’ll gladly add this to my Folk Horror list.

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  Review by hesitant movie enjoyer

  beware of false prophets which come to you in Sheen's clothing

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  Review by Noah Thompson ★★★★ 2

  Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

  One of my most anticipated films of the year did not disappoint at all. Gareth Evans trades in claustrophobic fisticuffs spectacle for grand-scale Gothic horror, and proves he can do both almost equally well. Apostle is the film equivalent of nails on a chalkboard in the best way possible. Starts at the top of the board, going slow and quiet. But it keeps building and building until it's ear-splitting and cringe-inducing by the end. Again, this is all meant in a good way. Evans has seriously made something note-worthy here, and it was one like Netflix's previous film, Hold the Dark, where it…

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  Review by Patrick Willems ★★★½ 2

  I thought for the first hour that this might not get all that gross and gnarly and then I realized I should never underestimate Gareth Evans.

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  Review by Brian Tallerico ★★★½

  So this is kind of like a slow burn version of The Wicker Man in which you’ll almost forget it’s by the guy who did The Raid until it becomes an unholy insane goreapalooza and then you’ll remember.

  It’s pretty good.

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  Review by LeSchroeck ★★★½ 5

  SFF 18, Film 4, Netflix & Kill, Part 2: "The Raid of the Wicker Man" trifft es einigermaßen. Aber eben auch nicht völlig. Denn Gareth Evans hat noch ein wenig mehr im Sinn und Angebot, was ich allerdings hier nicht spoilen möchte. Er braucht nur ein wenig zu lang, um seinen psychologischen wie naturalistischen Albtraum gar nicht mal so unterschwellig zum Ende zu bringen. Dabei spannt er uns eigentlich gar nicht so lang auf die Folter(bank), sondern macht das lieber mit einigen anderen Figuren. Und obwohl er sich viel Mühe gibt, das alles so authentisch, dreckig (mit Schmutz bis in die Ohren) oder ecklig zu gestalten, wird die Illusion immer mal wieder durch Details wie strahlend weiße Zähne oder gezupfte Augenbrauen…