In the third act of Daniel Kokotajlo’s Apostasy, a psalm appears on-screen: “Throw your burden on Jehovah and he will sustain you.” It functions more as a provocation than a prayer. Based on writer-director Kokotajlo’s own upbringing as a Jehovah’s Witness in Manchester, his edifying slow burn of a debut looks at a trio of women each wrestling with the rules and restrictions of their religion.
Eighteen-year-old Alex (Molly Wright) and her older sister Luisa (Sacha Parkinson) are devout Witnesses. Under the watchful eye of their single mother Ivanna (Siobhan Finneran), the girls attend meetings at their Kingdom Hall and spend their spare time learning Urdu in order to spread the word to the local Muslim community as part of their door-to-door duties. Kokotajlo treats their shared belief in the coming Armageddon (and the paradise that is supposed to follow) with utter seriousness.
Alex is shocked to discover that her sister, who studies at a nearby college and mixes with the secular kids, has neglected to tell her friends about her faith. “You’ve let college get to your head,” scolds Ivanna, reprimanding her daughter for missing meetings in order to attend art classes. When Luisa reveals that she is pregnant – and keeping the baby – she is promptly “disfellowshipped”, the church elders insisting the family cut contact until she is officially reinstated.
Teenage pregnancies aren’t the only thing the church won’t tolerate. Alex thumbs a pamphlet of “kids who died for Jehovah”, knowing that she might have to do the same. Though she suffers from a kind of anaemia (severe enough to warrant a transfusion as a baby, despite vehement protest from the elders), she tells her doctor that, as an adult with custody over her own body, she will refuse the transfer of blood.
Already ashamed of her supposed impurity (“to mess with the body is the worst sin”), Alex feels at a disadvantage with new boyfriend Steven (Robert Emms), a youngish elder transplanted from London. Pursuing her with Ivanna’s approval, the sensible, straight-backed Steven tells Alex that he’d like to get to know her. “I don’t know if you’d like me if you really got to know me,” she replies, mostly to herself. Kokotajlo emphasises the awkwardness of their courtship, continually positioning them a little too far away from one another. Like the wrong ends of two magnets, an invisible forcefield seems to stop them connecting; when they kiss, it’s a hard, tight-lipped affair. “We could do all right, you know,” exhales Steven with a chilling, happy sigh.
Cinematographer Adam Scarth favours tight close-ups and two-shots that tend to focus on one character at a time. Much like his dramatic sensibility, Kokotajlo’s aesthetic is subtle and even-handed. A drab, brownish colour palette mimics the austerity encouraged by the elders, the day-to-day drained of worldly pleasures.
With an expectation established that the narrative will concentrate on the girls, a dramatic event in the film’s third act instead shifts the emphasis to Ivanna. Another director might build to this moment as a climax, but Kokotajlo chooses to spend time amid the wreckage. The absence of catharsis makes the film’s cold conclusion all the more devastating.
The three lead performances are exceptionally controlled. Wright creates the sense of Alex’s deep spiritual connection with Jehovah but plays her as shy and self-conscious, a wide-eyed little girl lost. Finneran, on the other hand, dares to portray Ivanna as an unsympathetic character. There is a blankness to her, a stony gaze that betrays only the faintest flicker of doubt as her daughter pleads with her through angry tears. Yet her character motivation remains crystal clear. As Luisa, Parkinson, who caught the eye as Stacey Stringfellow in E4’s wonderful but short-lived series My Mad Fat Diary in 2013, is furious, exhausted, eager to please but unable to compromise. Despite her efforts to reintegrate herself into the church, the patriarchal powers that be declare: “She likes to voice her opinion too much.”
Kokotajlo presents this world from the perspective of somebody who has experienced and understands it. Frequently, the film is enraging. Not because it shows the way in which dogma has the power to rewire the moral instincts of its devotees, but for the sombreness with which it acknowledges that the devotees allow this to happen.
