Gareth Evans is a filmmaker who’s best known for his work in the action genre. Most recently, Havoc on Netflix starring Tom Hardy. However, his biggest success, thanks to the word-of-mouth of YouTube and Reddit comment sections and that one friend everyone has who watches Indonesian martial arts films and isn’t afraid to let you know about it—you know the one—is the wildly excellent The Raid duology. Specifically, the first film with its incredible action set pieces and the greatest climactic two-on-one battle between a dastardly Yahan Ruhian against the film’s protagonist and their reformed sibling, who was previously on the opposing side. You wouldn’t think that such a narrow concept for a fight scene would have to be ranked, but Boy Kills World did the same thing last year, and nobody talks about it. We’re going to dog-ear that for now and talk about it on another day.
Evans could’ve been pigeon-holed into the category of the “action guy,” and in a lot of ways, he is, but before his most recent Netflix outing, he made another film for the streaming service: 2018’s Apostle, and in a surprising twist, it wasn’t an action film. It was a horror film—but you knew that. You read the title. And if you didn't, check again. We weren't being coy with the subject matter. Evans isn’t a stranger to the horror genre, having directed the ‘Safe Haven’ segment of V/H/S 2 (2013), but the idea of a filmmaker going from a widely praised action film like The Raid to a pagan horror film about an island cult is a surprising turn. That’d be like Chad Stahelski going from John Wick to something like Midsommar. Be honest, if you saw that in the Upcoming section of his filmography on IMDb, you would immediately Google it to verify.
What’s fun about Apostle is that if you went into it just looking for a creepy horror movie starring Dan Stevens—star of the ‘Esther’s Throat’ sketch in Tom Segura’s new show, Bad Thoughts, and also other movies—nothing about the film would immediately scream, “Action director!” It’s a very methodical and steadily paced horror film with a focus on tension from the ‘traitor in our midst’ premise of Stevens infiltrating an island cult in an attempt to rescue his sister. There’s also a supernatural edge with the Goddess that the cult worships—the claustrophobic scene of Stevens in the water canal is like the Evil Dead version of Rama hiding in the wall in The Raid, and it’s terrifying. If you went into the film with no context of the filmmaker or his work, you would never assume he made his name in the action genre. That’s speaking from personal experience.
Oh! Speaking of aggressive tonal shifts, one of the best parts of this classy and creepy folk horror film, which takes place in 1905, so it's technically a period piece at the start of the third act, when out of nowhere—no, seriously, out of…NOWHERE, there’s a well-shot and executed fist fight between one of the leaders—and eventual zealot—of the island, named Quinn (Mark Lewis Jones), and Jeremy (Bill Milner), a teenage boy he’s wronged.
It's a rough and gritty scene where the camera flows with the action, similarly to what Evans did in The Raid films. The camera pans around and follows the action and flows with the movements made, and the choreography isn't overly flashy, which makes sense, considering these are two villagers who are just expelling their aggression onto one another, but the raw brutality of it is really effective. For a little over a minute, it feels like you entered a completely different movie. Seriously, outside of an earlier scene in a church, there’s been nothing to imply that there’d be a slick action set piece in the movie at all, let alone between these two British actors who look like they could have been in the cast of Downton Abbey. And, you know what? It’s probably the most entertaining scene in the movie.
It’s such a stylistic shift from everything that preceded it that it sets the tone for the remainder of the movie. From that point on, when conflict arises in the story, you don’t know if it’s going to be resolved verbally, through grotesque violence, or a fun fight scene. That one scene doesn’t necessarily recontextualize the movie, but it gives it an added element of unpredictability that could be attributed to Evans’s action background, as opposed to if it were done by a filmmaker who firmly specializes in the horror genre. That’s what makes it so interesting, since a lot of the best and most classic horror films are made by filmmakers who aren’t known primarily for horror films—the most obvious being Stanley Kubrick and William Friedkin. The idea of a slow-paced, scary movie being directed by a filmmaker who specializes in fast-paced, expertly choreographed action movies makes it an odd little anomaly that not a lot of people know about, but should definitely check out.