Gareth Evans' Netflix movie Apostle has gotten a trailer and it's as intense as one would expect the preview for an action-horror film by the director of The Raid 1&2 to be. The project - which Evans also wrote in addition to helming - will premiere at the 2018 Fantastic Fest (which starts this week), before it begins streaming through Netflix around mid-October.
Dan Stevens stars in Apostle as Thomas Richardson, a man whose sister Andrea (Lucy Boynton) is kidnapped and held for ransom by a mysterious religious cult on a remote island, circa 1905. While this is Evans' first feature-length foray into horror (as well as his fifth movie overall), the filmmaker is far from a stranger to the genre. Evans previously helmed the "Safe Haven" segment of the 2013 horror anthology sequel V/H/S/2 and his Raid movies arguably have tinges of horror, amidst all their blood-letting action.
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Joining Stevens and Boynton in the Apostle cast are such names as Michael Sheen (Masters of Sex), Kristine Froseth (Sierra Burgess is a Loser), Mark Lewis Jones (Star Wars: The Last Jedi) and Bill Milner (Dunkirk) in key supporting or leading roles. For more on that, check out the Apostle trailer in the space below.
Judging by the trailer, Apostle is more action-driven than your average horror offering and features some pretty nasty violence (specifically, of the variety that involves torture devices). That's to be expected, though, seeing as Evans has a history of making thrillers fueled by gruesome brutality and twisted imagery that goes beyond The Raid movies, all the way back to his debut on 2006's Footsteps - a thriller that features a villain who likes to film murders and rapes from an abandoned underpass.
Apostle is one of two horror-thrillers directed by cult filmmakers that Netflix will unveil over the next month. The other project in question is Green Room helmer Jeremy Saulnier's new film Hold the Dark, an adaptation of William Giraldi's book that pits Westworld's Jeffrey Wright against killer Alaskan wolves... and Alexander Skarsgård. Apostle and Hold the Dark are both set to make their U.S. premieres at Fantastic Fest 2018, so it won't be long before genre fans get to weigh in with their own thoughts on the pair.
Evans' film, for its part, certainly looks effectively horrifying. It's also nice to see that Stevens isn't done making creepy and otherwise bizarre genre entertainment like Apostle either, following his turn in Adam Wingard's The Guest and his continuing role as David Haller on FX's trippy X-Men series Legion.
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Source: Netflix
