FYI, not a major media outlet, but an interesting review from The FIlm Stage
Apostasy: San Sebastian 2017 Review
The Film Stage, Monday, October 16, 2017
A central scene in Apostasy, the powerful debut from British director Daniel Kokotajlo, has a group of kids stage a re-enactment of King Solomon’s judgment, the parable from the Book of Kings. In the story, the king concocts a plan to settle who is the true mother of young boy. He says he’ll cut the child in two, dividing it among the two women. The true mother, of course, is declared after she says she’ll give up the baby. The king knows this because no mother would kill her child.
The story echoes disturbingly through this compelling drama... which never seeks to denigrate Jehovah’s Witnesses beliefs (although it certainly robustly challenges them)... It might alarm outsiders that a seemingly conventional religion might subscribe to practices more associated with Scientology.
While not belittling individuals who take up the faith, Kolkotajlo ruminates on the arbitrary sacrifices people, particularly women, make.
Jehovah’s Witnesses may subscribe to a fire-and-brimstone rhetoric, but Kokotajlo’s film is almost unnervingly restrained, with cinematographer Adam Scarth contrasting a bleak palette of industrial England with brightly-lit interiors of the Witnesses’ church. Kokotajlo’s careful control of tone and setting is disquieting – this is a film where conflicts are hidden beneath the surface, bubbling away, revealed only when this family’s rigid beliefs boil over with devastating consequences.
READ FULL REVIEW: https://thefilmstage.com/reviews/san-sebastian-review-apostasy-is-a-restrained-troubling-portrait-of-rigid-religiosity/
