Apostle (2018) Review

Apostle was directed by Gareth Evans and stars Dan Stevens, Michael Sheen (from Underworld) and Lucy Boynton (from Don’t Knock Twice). It’s about a guy who travels to a remote island to rescue his sister from a cult.

Netflix has invested around 19 billion dollars ($19,000,000,000) in new content since 2016. How do you spend that much? Well, Netflix started by buying up a lot of great TV shows and movies. Then they started re-releasing new versions of old favorites, then they started giving everyone their own shows.. and they still had a bajillion dollars left (and an army of shareholders demanding they invest it). So then they started recycling literally everything they could find, including The Wicker Man.

Apostle is The Wicker Man.

Lots of reviews say it’s similar to, reminiscent of and that it pays homage to The Wicker Man. Those guys are either just being kind or haven’t actually seen The Wicker Man, because it’s essentially just a bloodier reboot.

Here are a few of the exact details they share in common:

– A guy learns of a missing girl after receiving a mysterious letter
– Secluded island
– Failing crops
– Festival with creepy masks
– Religious supreme leader
– Island run by one sex. In the original Wicker Man reboot it was women, this time its men
– Guy realizes the predicament he’s in after it’s too late to leave the island

So now that we can just call this Wicker Man 3, how does it compare with 1 and 2?

1 was sexy, suspenseful and shocking
2 was funny, intriguing and intense
3 was slow, dramatic and bloody

Not necessarily bad of course, just more inline with Netflix’s recent trend of dramatic slow burns than with horror.

Watching Apostle was a lot like watching a really, really long episode of a gritty show like Vikings or Frontier.