Daniel Kokotajlo’s first film watches a Jehovah’s Witness household in Oldham from the inside and declines to argue with it, which is what makes it hurt. Siobhan Finneran and Molly Wright are exact. The second half is bolder than it is tidy.
A mother and two daughters live in a small house in Oldham and go to the Kingdom Hall. The younger daughter, Alex (Molly Wright), has anaemia, and the doctors keep raising the matter of a transfusion; she keeps declining, because blood is forbidden and because the congregation has told her, since she was a baby, that she is a kind of example. The older daughter, Luisa (Sacha Parkinson), has started college and come home with ideas and a boyfriend. Their mother, Ivanna (Siobhan Finneran), believes all of it. Daniel Kokotajlo, writing and directing his first film, grew up in this faith, and Apostasy is the rare film about a closed religion that never once steps outside to explain it to us.
We recommend it, and we recommend it to people who think they have seen this film before. The usual version has a sceptic in it, someone to ask the questions the audience is asking. Kokotajlo leaves that person out. Nobody argues with the doctrine. The camera simply watches people live by it, and John Ellis’s production design does a great deal of the work: magnolia walls, stackable chairs, a hall that could be a dentist’s waiting room, a front room where the Bible sits beside the remote control. Lance Milligan dresses the women in long skirts and cardigans and the brothers in suits a size too careful, so that the faith is visible in every frame without anyone having to mention it.
The first act turns on Luisa’s pregnancy. The elders, Brian (James Quinn) and Alan (James Foster), hold a meeting, and the result is announced to the congregation in a sentence. The rules say the family must cut her off, and the film shows what that means at a kitchen table, in a parked car, on a doorstep. The announcement scene moved us more than anything else in the film, and it was Finneran who did it. She does not cry. She sits upright in her chair with her bag on her lap and lets her mouth go slightly slack, and we understood she had already chosen, and that the choice had cost her something she would never admit to.
Molly Wright plays Alex as a believer, not a victim. She practises Urdu phrases at the bus stop so she can preach to the neighbours, prays in whispered voiceover with the plainness of someone leaving a message, and when Steven (Robert Emms), a young elder, begins courting her under the congregation’s eye, she is pleased in a way that is painful to watch. Emms makes Steven sincere and faintly ridiculous at once, a man who has learned to speak in paragraphs from a leaflet. The scenes between the two of them are the film’s gentlest and among its most unsettling.
Adam Scarth shoots in low grey northern light, almost all of it indoors, and keeps the frame tight, so that rooms feel smaller than they are and faces are rarely allowed to look away from each other. Napoleon Stratogiannakis cuts slowly and holds shots a beat past comfort. Matthew Wilcock’s music is barely there, a low tone under certain scenes and silence under the rest, and the silence is the right call. There is a great deal of speech in this film and almost none of it is loud.
Then, around the midpoint, the film does something we will not describe, and the second half is a different film. We think the decision is brave. We also think it costs something. After the turn the elders harden from two particular men into a single instrument, Steven’s part of the story resolves too neatly, and the scenes with the wider family, Cousin Michelle (Jessica Baglow), Cousin Barry (Christian Foster), Aunty Linda (Clare McGlinn), begin to feel like illustrations of a point already made. One critic has suggested the material might have worked better as a documentary. We disagree, because the point of the film is Finneran’s face and Wright’s, but we understand the complaint: the structure shows its bones.
Films about faith usually want a renunciation scene, a door kicked open, a speech. Kokotajlo refuses to give us one, and at 94 minutes he does not pad the refusal. It is a PG certificate, which seems about right. Nothing in it would frighten a child except the adults.
