We are reprinting this film review by the author Henrik Sorensen from his Substack page, where he frequently posts about LDS issues. You also might know Henrik from his Twitter feed, @nihilists4jesus (Gnome Chomsky). He has recently published a space opera novel Corsair and A Thin Black Veil, a collection of Gothic stories drawn from the Mormon cultural, historical, and cosmological landscape.
I first saw The Angel when I made the difficult choice, as a pseudonymous writer, to show up to the Faith Matters conference this summer and actually meet a few people in person (sorry to everyone I did meet for being a sweaty mess but thanks for letting me crash dinner). Friends had told me that if nothing else, it was worth sticking around for a screening of The Angel, and they were people whose taste I trusted, so I gave it a shot, going in basically blind. I will be honest: I did not have particularly high expectations. I didn’t know anything about the filmmakers and I wasn’t sure if I was about to experience the miserable secondhand embarrassment that comes from watching basically a student film. Further, when I saw that the subject matter was tied to polygamy I had prepped my eyes for some serious rolling as I waited for every single trope and stereotype to show up on screen.
Anyway, I was wrong about everything. The Angel is beautifully shot, the acting is genuinely powerful, and the story charges straight into the complexities and contradictions of polygamy without resorting to cheap shots or lazy cliches. It’s not “good for an indie short film,” it’s just good and, most importantly for a horror film, it’s actually scary.
Set in southern Utah in 1881, the film captures the isolation, alienation, and claustrophobia of living on the frontier. A Mormon pioneer and his two wives, one of which he obviously and openly favors, live together in a cramped cabin in a desert canyon and navigate the difficulties of polygamy and life and on the fringe until an angel appears and sets a very dark story in motion.
The Burgins use every second of the film incredibly efficiently, packing tension, jealousy, longing, and fear into each frame. The brilliant Doug Jones plays the namesake angel, but honestly it’s Tatum Langton, as the first and favored wife, who anchors the entire film through little more than her expressiveness and her ability to show the swirling conflictions and contradictions in which both wives have been swept up on her face in scene after scene. Her ability to simultaneously embody a sense of fear and rapture when the angel appears to her make the whole scene feel very real and very scary.
In the end, beyond direction, acting, and production values, all of which I thought (as a film enjoyer but really not a film buff by any means) were outstanding, it’s the fact that the Burgins are approaching the story from a deep understanding of Mormonism that makes the film work not just as a horror film but as a genuine Mormon horror film. Comparisons to Heretic are inevitable, but Heretic isn’t really Mormon horror, per se, it’s a horror movie that has Mormons in it. Those sisters missionaries could just as easily have been Jehovah’s Witnesses or Catholic nuns or Muslims or really any religion at all and the nature of the movie doesn’t change (I liked Heretic, for what it’s worth). But if you want a horror film that really truly sprouted up out of Mormon soil, The Angel fits the bill and it does so without being antagonistic or obnoxiously didactic or smug. There are points to be made, but the movie never feels like it’s part of some ideological crusade in any direction: it’s a story rooted in history and real feelings felt by real people, then and now, but it is a story, not a lesson.
Moving back to the film itself, it really does feel like a full movie packed into less than 20 minutes. There are a few moments, including the appearance of the angel himself, Doug Jones’ unmatched physical acting as one of the wives reaches out to shake his hand, the angel’s shadow on the wall as the wives carry out his edicts, and the heartstopping final scene as the wives are forced to reckon with the reality of what they have just experienced, that are up there with anything I’ve seen anywhere. Forget “Mormon horror,” these moments are just good horror (and any really good Mormon art needs to be good in its own right, not just in the small pond of its Mormon subcategory).
Horror works so well as art because it pushes to the most extreme and sometimes absurd boundaries of human existence and behavior to ask (and occasionally even answer) difficult questions. The Angel asks difficult questions; it confronts the inherent contradictions that faith forces us to try to reconcile; it addresses how easily we give in to any voice that’s telling us what we want to hear and how evil can subvert good people with good intentions toward evil ends. Mostly importantly, it reminds us that when you meet an angel, you really shouldn’t skip the part where you shake their hand.
Henrik Sorensen is a novelist, essayist, and short story writer who splits time between the National Capital Region and…elsewhere. A family man, a philologist with a love of any language spoken between the Urals and the Altai Mountains, and a person who unfortunately holds a full-time job beside writing, Henrik spends the late hours of the night hunched over a keyboard trying desperately to stay focused on his current writing project. His short fiction collection, A Thin Black Veil, was recently reviewed by Conor Hilton on this blog.