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

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?

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.

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

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.

dan stevens is perfection

Very bad

For a good 80 minutes Apostle is an effectively creepy picture that hints at the horrors committed in the name of religion. But then there’s the appearance of a forest goddess, a secondary character suddenly takes center stage, a main character dissipates for no coherent narrative reason, and myriad other developments occur, each one taking away from the solidly disturbing movie this had been up until that point. In the end this is very disjointed, and not at all satisfactory.

The Wicker Man II: The Wickening.

Some great imagery and production design , fantastic acting and direction and an intriguing central idea are all slightly let down by some dumb logic and a surprisingly generic plot structure.

Strange but I liked it.

Out of all the shocking moments in this film I’ll never forget that one with the poor sheep.

i watched this for lucy boynton and lucy boynton only

It started out as an interesting film, but fell apart by the end in my opinion. I think I would've liked it better if it had played less on the "paranormal" (magic?) elements and focused more on the religious aspect or interactions within the cult.

What starts out as an interesting “The Witch-like” take on religion and horror goes off the rails especially in the third act with a supernatural storyline that breaks the rules the film established and removes the symbolic underpinnings of the story. Well made with some good performances though.