On APOSTASY

(This piece contains a whopping spoiler)

Daniel Kokotajlo's Apostasy is surprising, subverting our expectations and pulling a rug from under our feet on so many occasions: it's this brilliance in his storytelling, abetted by a total formal mastery, that makes his tale of women struggling with their faith so compelling and powerful. I'd like to talk about some of the shocks and surprises along the way, and how Kokotajlo creates them through a highly effective shot selection and by playing on received ideas and genre tropes.

A key theme of Apostasy is displacement: it's there in the way the film is at pains to guide our looks in one direction (namely, towards the initial protagonist, Alex), so that we are startled and overwhelmed when the focus moves on, half-way through the film, when Alex dies. Kokotajlo takes pleasing liberties with perspective, showing Alex in the centre of the frame, and her sister, Luisa, often displaced to the fringes, sometimes in blurred outline. Moreover Alex's thoughts and fears are presented to us in a confessional mode - at one point quite boldly during a service at the Jehovah's Witness church the three women attend. It's an audacious proposition to present us with an 'inner' character who then abruptly leaves the movie: in part, because we have been led to believe that the question of whether or not to have a transfusion, in contravention of Jehovah's Witness dictates, would form the core argument of the film. As it is, Kokotajlo side-swipes that issue by having the whole question play out off camera, in a totally elided scene: we've been watching the wrong film all along. We thought we were going to be seeing a struggle between reason and dogma; in reality, we will be presented with a tussle between dogma and human kindness - and the protagonists will be Luisa, and her mother. Kokotajlo's immediate shot after Alex's death in hospital is quite brilliant: Ivanna (Siobhan Finneran) bursts from the hospital in the middle distance, her figure blurry, lurch-striding towards the camera's focus, until she is up close and we can sound her pain, her panic, the flurry of hurt and questions going through her mind, as her eyes dart around, and she walks off again. Kokotajlo cuts from this short, silent scene to a long funeral, with cool precision. 

The shot selection continues to tell the story, and to mine its characters' feelings, with great efficiency throughout. Witness a magnificent shot/reverse-shot later on, when Ivanna visits Luisa: the focus of the scene is on their inability to talk to each other; Ivanna is forbidden from speaking to her estranged apostate daughter, while the two of them are still grieving, one of them advanced in pregnancy, both weighted down by rancour, sadness, and longing for comfort. This is well conveyed, as the camera stays on Ivanna - and then, quickly, we see the other side of the exchange, as Ivanna is leaving: the emptiness and misery, the sad squalor of her daughter's flat. This is what Ivanna was beholding. Kokotajlo often withholds like this, before showing something with a grim flourish, gaining immense power in the revelation.

This process happens again, in a scene where Ivanna is boiling with sadness and rage during a church service where she is being personally cautioned by the priest. Kokotajlo plays on stereotypical tropes of heroism, as we implore Ivanna to take a stand - literally, to stand up and leave the room where she is a prisoner, where she is being tortured by her faith, to the detriment of everything she has in the world. We will her on, because Finneran (in a truly heroic performance) plays so well that simmering rage, the indecision, the doubts that plague Ivanna, and the way they are bubbling so close to the surface - and when, finally, she does leave the service, we applaud her silently. At last, the stand that we have been waiting for. But Kokotajlo plays an ace card here, mercilessly - a shot of bitter irony, as he films Ivanna bursting from the room and seeking refuge from the cant in the bathroom, where, horrifically, the words of the preacher's sermon are relayed via a loudspeaker. Our expectations are destroyed: there is no escape; there is no resistance. 

In fact, Kokotajlo flips the whole dynamic of the film we believe we're watching. We think we're watching a film where someone will stand up for what they think is right, in the face of adversity: and, here's the kicker, we are watching that film. But what that character thinks is right is not what we think is right. We are watching, in fact, heartrendingly misplaced heroism, where someone's willpower and faith in her rightness impel her constantly to disappoint us. It's testament to Kokotajlo's pert perspective that he pulls off this reversal. That his film is headed this way comes after another immaculate one-two punch: an irruption into the slow-paced, measured, colourless film of a gaudy religious advertorial. Suddenly, the movie gives over to sun-drenched shots of Jesus, set to cheap music, and pictures of his adoring faithful. Kokotajlo gains huge ironic clout from the stylistic gap between his film and this cloying message of faith, which makes the religious message seem vapid, and plays ironically against the terseness of the film so far. But then we're hit with another rug-pull, as the movie cuts to Ivanna, watching the film and crying. We see that she derives immense solace from this ragbag of inanities: Kokotajlo's idea isn't to mock this film at all, but to show how it can in fact help people who need it. Once again, we find we aren't watching the film we thought we were watching; again, we are seeing the reverse of the shot, which surprises us. Again we see that our expectations were thin. 

In a brilliant final shot, Kokotajlo films Ivanna in the public sphere, as other people see her in her hometown: just a woman standing with some leaflets in a town centre. Filmed in silence, in the middle distance, she is a nobody, just another person, in sharp contrast to the woman of roiling emotions whose life we have watched fall apart. It's a shot that could be cruel, but which also shows compassion. It is the only shot the film could have ended on, giving it a little touch of smart-aleckry, because we know to what extent the film has taken an interest in filming the other side. Once again, the film asks us to investigate the silences it has probed throughout: all the quiet and disquiet of its characters, filmed in unblinking still shots; all their inability to communicate, seized in their eyes - this shot calls back to all of this, in a few short seconds, before giving way to darkness.