Witnesses battle inner angels and demons
Remember those guys with cheap suits and neat haircuts that used to ring your doorbell in the 80s? There were always two of them, they were always American, and what they were selling was salvation. My dad gave them short shrift, but the Jehovah’s Witnesses were here to stay, and their communities tend to be impressively tight-knit. What started as a doomsday cult in 1880s Pennsylvania has become a worldwide faith with a following in excess of 20 million souls: why the chap sitting next to you on the Luas might be one.
One hears little about them, but in the next few weeks, no less than two films will explore the hidden world of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Later this month, Richard Eyre’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel The Children Act will dramatise the story of a Jehovah’s Witness couple who oppose the administration of a potentially life-saving blood transfusion to their child. The faithful consider transfusions a violation of God’s law, and that vexing issue is also central to Apostasy, Daniel Kokotajlo’s impressively accomplished debut feature based on his own upbringing as a Jehovah’s Witness.
Siobhan Finneran (late of Downton Abbey) is Ivanna, a middleaged Oldham woman who’s a steadfast believer and has made sure her two daughters stay firmly in the fold. This becomes problematic when her eldest girl, Luisa (Sacha Parkinson), becomes pregnant by an outsider and is cast into the wilderness by the elders. Ivanna silently assents to his expulsion, and pours all her pious hopes into her angelic younger child Alex (Molly Wright), who’s still at school and takes her religion very seriously. Her mother’s delighted when a Jehovah elder takes a shine to Alex, but the girl is haemophiliac, and God may not be available to provide a cure.
The most interesting thing about Apostasy is its detached and dispassionate gaze: it resists the urge to rush to judgement, preferring instead to investigate the comforts and sacrifices of religious faith, and Finneran is superb as the poised and repressed Ivanna.
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One of the more forgettable animated franchises that flounder in the wake of the Disney and Pixar behemoths, Hotel Transylvania uses stock characters from 30s horror pictures to create an alternate world in which monsters are not villains, but victims. In the 2012 original, Adam Sandler provided the voice of Count Dracula who, after his wife is killed by a human mob, turns his castle into a monster hotel so that his fellow ghouls can live in safety and comfort.
He has a beloved daughter, Mavis (voiced by Selena Gomez), and the Count was devastated when she fell in love with a human, a wishy washy new-age Californian fool called Johnny (Andy Samberg). In Hotel Transylvania 2, they had a baby, whom Dracula did his best to influence in a suitably monstrous way. And in this third film, Mavis decides her dad needs a holiday, and books him and the entire household on a luxury cruise.
It turns out to be a trip through the terrifying delights of the Bermuda Triangle, but something is amiss: the ship’s glamorous captain, Ericka (Kathryn Hahn) is actually the great-granddaughter of Dracula’s old nemesis Abraham Van Helsing, and plans to destroy the lot of them. And to make matters worse, the Count has fallen in love with her.
This is unsubtle stuff, no question, and Sandler’s Count is an unengaging creation. But Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation somehow manages to outdo its predecessors, thanks to some winning animation and a series of absurdly elaborate set-pieces that build towards a memorably silly climax. There are some decent voice performances too, particularly from Steve Buscemi and Kathryn Hahn, but this may be the last we hear from Hotel Transylvania. It probably ought to be.