Daniel Kokotajlo (2017)
Apostasy is formidably disciplined. The writer-director Daniel Kokotajlo’s first feature is the story of crisis within a Lancashire family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The visual style of the film – the tight camera movement and cutting, the limited palette, shots that lock characters into the frame, lighting that places them in shadow – creates a claustrophobia analogous to the restrictive, rule-bound existence of single mother Ivanna Whitling (Siobhan Finneran) and her daughters, twentyish Luisa (Sacha Parkinson) and Alex (Molly Wright), who’s just turned eighteen. With the help of his cinematographer Adam Scarth and editor Napoleon Stratogiannakis, Kokotajlo pushes the viewer straight into what, to the people on the screen, is normal life and this is nearly the only life to which he allows access throughout. The viewer’s sense of suffocation derives from the increasingly grim and aberrant religious culture in evidence but one of the fascinations of Apostasy is how close – after a while, how agonisingly close – the characters seem to normality. Ivanna and her daughters don’t look in the least odd. They use mobile phones. Ivanna has an office job and Luisa drives a car. Ivanna and Alex occasionally treat themselves to a visit to a nail salon. The local Kingdom Hall, where several crucial scenes take place, is situated close to a motorway. There are repeated shots of the Hall’s exterior with motorway traffic passing by – quotidian, oblivious.
Both daughters cause the family crisis, in very different ways. Although Kokotajlo shows next to nothing of it, Luisa already engages with another world. She’s doing a further education course: a scene involving her, two friends and Alex reveals that Luisa hasn’t told anyone at college that she’s a Jehovah’s Witness. Even this sequence, shot close-up within the car the four are travelling in, is claustrophobic. One of the passengers, Umar (Aqib Khan), is in fact Luisa’s boyfriend (and a Muslim). A little while later, she reveals to Ivanna and Alex that she’s pregnant by him. When her mother insists that Umar will ‘have to start coming to meetings’, Luisa tells her, ‘It’s not going to happen’. Her transgression leads to Luisa’s expulsion and ostracisation, known within the faith as ‘disfellowshipping’. Readmittance is possible if a sinner fully admits the error of their ways and convinces elders they genuinely want to return to the fold. In the meantime, the Witnesses’ rulebook (a very singular interpretation of Christian scripture) more or less forbids contact with the lost sheep – a proscription that applies equally to members of their family.
While Luisa’s behaviour seems fairly typical of someone rebelling against the constraints of a repressive religious upbringing, Alex’s predicament is very specific to the family’s denomination. As a baby, she received a blood transfusion from hospital doctors before elders could stop them – a medical intervention that saved her present life and, according to the Jehovah’s Witness creed, imperilled her eternal one – that is, her prospects of physical resurrection in the ‘new system’ which the sect expects to follow imminent Armageddon. (They don’t believe in the immortality of the soul, scorned by Ivanna as a tenet of ‘airy-fairy’ religions.) Alex’s neo-natal treatment has left her with an appetite for atonement that feeds her righteous fervour. Although permitted to take medication for the anaemia from which she still suffers, she feels compelled to let Steven (Robert Emms), a novice elder recently arrived in the community and keen to initiate a courtship with Alex, know about her impurity. When her blood disorder suddenly worsens and she requires another transfusion, the fearlessly devout Alex refuses and dies. By having this happen off-screen, Kokotajlo achieves a strong shock effect.
After much debate, it’s agreed that Luisa may attend her sister’s funeral service. (Luisa and Umar have split by now.) Her return to the Kingdom Hall marks the start of a gripping battle of wills and struggle with consciences in Apostasy. Urged on by Ivanna, Luisa agrees to seek readmission to the fellowship but her growing religious doubts, anger at Alex’s death and resistance to indoctrination are too great. Once she’s displeased the elders a second time, they’re all the more hardline in discouraging contact between Luisa and her increasingly conflicted mother. Ivanna’s dilemma continues throughout Luisa’s pregnancy and after the birth of her baby. ‘They won’t have blood transfusions’ is one of the first things many people would say if asked to describe Jehovah’s Witnesses. To that extent, Daniel Kokotajlo’s choice of dramatic catalyst may seem obvious but it’s surely right. The context of his film is unusual, to say the least. Taking the opportunity to make a drama out of a crucial part of the Witnesses’ dogma makes good sense.
Kokotajlo, from Manchester, was raised a Jehovah’s Witness until he too became an apostate in his early twenties. Personal experience no doubt helped him build up the documentary side of Apostasy. Luisa and Alex have learned Urdu, as part of an initiative to widen the scope of the campaign for converts; ‘serving where the need is great,’ says Steven admiringly. His relationship with Alex, of which Ivanna thoroughly approves, implies a system of quasi-arranged marriages operating within the community. Alex and Steven combine their religious activities with part-time, lowly paid jobs – she gardens, he cleans windows – although Steven has ambitions to be a full-time senior elder whose salary will be enough to keep them both. The procedural detail in the film is consistently interesting but would count for less than it does if Kokotajlo didn’t link it to convincing individual characters. Although Alex and Steven are still courting when she falls ill, his enthusiasm seems to ebb as he absorbs the implications of her physical and consequent spiritual condition. Yet Steven perhaps lacks the personal self-confidence, as well the clear moral justification, needed to reject Alex, even though, for a career-minded young elder, she is damaged goods.
The integrity of the writing and direction is matched by the acting. Apostasy is welcome and eloquent evidence that the words and deeds of objectionable or inhumane people in a film or play are more startling when the actor concerned resists censure of the character and inhabits it sympathetically. The immobile face and stiff gait of Siobhan Finneran’s Ivanna dramatise the deadlock between the imperatives of motherhood and religious adherence that are eating at her. (Ivanna is isolated and unsmiling even within the community of believers. You want to know more about her backstory but come to accept that withholding that information is part of Kokotajlo’s strategy for placing the audience in the thick of the situation without being able to look outside it.) Molly Wright’s Alex is pallid yet she has a radiance too: that may well reflect her religious ardency but its effect is to put her within touching distance of a life beyond the sect and to make her death more tragic. Sacha Parkinson’s role is relatively conventional but she’s entirely persuasive in it. Robert Emms is truly excellent as Steven, in whom awkward eagerness, cowardice and a shrewd understanding of where his own best interests lie are intermixed. His climactic sermon in the Kingdom Hall (‘Jesus stated that his work could cause conflict within the household’) is perhaps slightly overwritten by Kokotajlo, in order to persuade Ivanna that Stephen’s words are aimed at her personally. But Emms’s delivery is perfect – he gives the words just the right weight. It’s to the credit of the other actors playing elders that, in their smaller roles, they too resist the temptation to be obviously malignant. As a result, they’re reliably enraging.
Just when Ivanna looks to be on the verge of putting family before faith, as we want her to do, Apostasy pulls the rug from under our feet. Her last encounter with her daughter and new grandchild builds to a breach with Luisa that may never be healed. On reflection, perhaps it couldn’t be otherwise. If Ivanna were fully reconciled with her elder daughter and (thereby) apostasised, she couldn’t avoid recognising the consequences for her younger daughter of the creed that has ruled their lives. The film’s closing shot is of Ivanna, alone in the street, handing (or least holding) out copies of The Watchtower. Daniel Kokotajlo doesn’t just keep his nerve in avoiding a comforting resolution. In doing so, he also keeps faith (as it were) with the unhappily conscientious Ivanna. The score is credited to Matthew Wilcock: if it features before the accompaniment to the closing credits, it’s so sparingly and subtly used that I didn’t notice it. Wilcock’s music at the end appropriately combines a hymnal rhythm and a melancholy tone. There have been a lot of supposedly ‘stunning’ feature debuts by British film-makers over the last couple of years – Beast, God’s Own Country, I Am Not a Witch, Lady Macbeth, The Levelling, Pin Cushion. Apostasy, along with I Am Not a Witch, deserves the accolade.
28 July 2018
