#30 - Apostle (2018)

Apostle (2018)

(dir. Gareth Evans)

Set in 1905, this film is about a cult located on a remote Irish island that takes a young woman captive in order to extort a ransom out of her wealthy father. They demand that he come alone with the money, but his estranged son takes his place instead, infiltrating the cult to find his sister and rescue her. He discovers what seems to be an idyllic community, but he finds out very quickly that the leaders are hiding a disturbing secret.

I really loved this movie. It starts off at a slow pace, but steadily ramps up the intensity until the wild and bloody third act. It almost feels like a completely different film by the end, like if The Wicker Man decided halfway through that it wanted to be The Evil Dead.  The impressive thing is that both halves work really well, which is not an easy feat for most directors. Evans is known for the action film The Raid, as well as the segment "Safe Haven" from V/H/S 2, but this is his first feature length horror film. If this is any indicator of what he is capable of, I am very excited to see what he does next.

This was just released on Netflix on October 12th, and already I can say that it is one of my favorite horror films of the year. If it has a fault, it's that it is maybe a little too long (2+ hours is unusual for a horror movie), but the pacing was excellent so I honestly didn't even notice. Available now on Netflix - I highly recommend checking it out.