Brave debut pits religion v reality
As British debuts go, Apostasy is one of the hardest-hitting in recent memory: scrupulously researched, and drawn from the life of its maker, Daniel Kokotajlo, who was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness before leaving the faith after college. He has created a family here – two sisters and their mother, living solemnly in Greater Manchester – whose struggle to stay intact under the religion’s strictures is a quivering effort of will.
One of the girls, Alex (newcomer Molly Wright) is very much her mother’s daughter, which we see in the furrowed brow afflicting both her and Ivanna (Siobhan Finneran) when life and creed come into conflict. Everything – above all, Alex’s sister Luisa (Sacha Parkinson), who gets pregnant with a “worldly boy” – is a spiritual dilemma to be solved, a mistake to be stubbornly reconciled.
After Luisa’s Kingdom Hall ejects her, her abandonment is brutal, and Kokotajlo makes a bold choice to limn it: Alex says nothing to her, muttering words in close-up strictly to her God. Her interior reality has banished the offending thought of a heretic sister.
More wrenching separations follow, which the film charts without music or melodrama. It has one colour scheme – bran, essentially – and rarely frees the trio from cheerless domesticity.
Emotionally, the film is a baton skilfully passed from Wright to Parkinson, both superb, while Finneran, severe and stricken, remains a constant. Unflinching to the last, the film ends with its loneliest image – a promise of heaven being spread on the street, but pledged on a patience in this life that not even saints could muster.