P.S. There's no way they used real KH to film this.
Here
is an utterly absorbing and accomplished debut feature from
writer-director Daniel Kokotajlo, known before this for his
well-regarded short films
Myra and The Mess Hall of an Online Warrior. Apostasy combines subtlety
and sensitivity with real emotional power. It also packs a sledgehammer
narrative punch two-thirds in, after which life in the film carries on
with eerie quietness as usual, while we, the audience, have no choice
but to go into a state of shock. It shows that Kokotajlo can really do
something so many new British film-makers can’t or won’t: tell a story.
The film is set among a community of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Oldham in
north-west England. Kokotajlo grew up in a Jehovah’s Witness family
before leaving the faith while at college, and his writing – detached
but calmly observant and sympathetic – is evidently based on a real
knowledge of this culture, invisible to outsiders. He has apparently
used the JW meeting hall in Oldham for the film: the building’s
exterior, at any rate. I have to say that Apostasy exposes the slightly
preposterous drama of Richard Eyre’s new film The Children Act,
with a similar plotline about Jehovah’s Witnesses, based on the Ian
McEwan novel. Apostasy is more knowledgeable, less excitable.
Siobhan Finneran plays Ivanna, a middle-aged woman firmly in the
Jehovah’s Witness faith: a world in which failure to believe, or to
avoid unbelievers, can get you shunned or “disfellowshipped”. She has
two teenage daughters: the older Luisa (Sacha Parkinson) is at college
and the younger Alex (Molly Wright) is still in school. Both live at
home, of course. As to the girls’ father, Kokotajlo leaves that as the
great unmentioned subject: whether alive or dead, his past behaviour and
current absence is a potent, silent countercurrent to the drama.
Ivanna is concerned about the bad influences Luisa will encounter at
college: people of no faith or, even worse, the wrong faith. (She
dismisses Catholicism as “wishy-washy”.) Her fears are well founded.
Luisa has an unbelieving boyfriend by whom she has got pregnant and her
excommunication (to borrow the wishy-washy term) is inevitable.
Meanwhile, delicate, shy, clever Alex is very flattered when a young
man, an up-and-coming elder in the JW faith, introduces himself to her
and her mother at the weekly meeting and asks them both to supper: this
is Steven, played by Robert Emms. Alex sees perfectly well how the match
is being made by her mother, in concert with the church, so that she
will not go down the same route as her sister, and, concerned as she is
for Luisa, this responsibility cements her already deeply committed
attachment to the orthodoxy. Family tensions become unbearable.
The performances of Finneran, Wright and Parkinson are tremendous and
all the more moving for their restraint. Kokotajlo’s direction is lucid
and direct. With cinematographer Adam Scarth (who also shot the recent Daphne),
he conjures an undramatic world of cloudy days and dull workplaces,
kitchens, front rooms. The women’s faces are captured mostly in intimate
closeup. Parkinson’s simmering anger as Luisa is almost unwatchably
painful, because her rebellion is always tempered by a need not to upset
her mother; Wright’s gentleness and tenderness in the role of Alex is
heartbreaking.
Finneran’s Ivanna is the most mysterious of all. She is a world away
from, say, Geraldine McEwan’s religious matriarch in the BBC TV
adaptation of Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in
1989. There is no righteous hysteria, no rage, just an utterly serene
contentment with the worldview she has grown up with, and the
inevitability of the “new system” that will come into being after this
current world has come to an end. But Ivanna’s faith is severely tested,
and there is a brilliant scene in which Kokotajlo comes in for another
key closeup on Ivanna undergoing a silent dark moment of the soul in the
midst of a prayer meeting. With the tiniest flinches and winces,
Finneran conveys Ivanna’s suppressed turmoil, before she stumbles out to
the lavatory to find the elder’s voice has been piped in there too, via
the PA system. The word of God is omnipresent. Apostasy is a supremely
intelligent and gripping drama.
