Sometimes, by complete coincidence, you end up watching two different movies set after the end of the world. Sometimes those two movies, though stylistically very different, are weirdly complementary. And so you’re left with little choice but to write about them.

A positive review from Bilge Ebiri piqued my interest in In the Lost Lands, written by Constantin Werner and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. The setup feels as much Western as fantastical: Boyce (Dave Bautista), a Man With No Name type, is hired by Gray Alys (Milla Jovovich) to take her into the ravaged landscape outside of the city, the only place where civilization still flourishes.

I have not read the George R.R. Martin stories that this film was based on, but I found myself thinking a lot about Stephen King’s Dark Tower series as I watched it. Like those books, this is set in a futuristic world where the ruins of the present day are still visible, but magic is also a presence; Gray Alys’s quest involves tracking down an elusive werewolf, and it’s strongly implied that she herself is functionally immortal. 

In the Lost Lands is pulpy as hell, which I absolutely mean as a compliment. Numerous shots look like they’re channeling the Boris Vallejo cover art for a lost fantasy classic, and both of the film’s central characters get standout action sequences, including one fight scene set atop a cable car made from a school bus. 

There’s a lot more palace intrigue than I was expecting in this film. Gray Alys sets out on her quest at the behest of the city’s queen, whose tyrannical husband is bedridden and who has been carrying on an affair with Boyce. There’s a lot of exposition here; in a film where virtually every character has a secret agenda, that’s to be expected. But what’s also notable about this approach are the ways in which the screenplay leaves certain things unexplained. It’s certainly implied that Gray Alys’s uncanny abilities and long life come at a cost — namely, that she cannot refuse any request made of her.

Was there a bit too much exposition? Maybe — but the next film I watched left me wondering if too much exposition is preferable to a more minimal amount. That would be director E.L. Katz’s Azrael, written by Simon Barrett, which stars Samara Weaving as a young woman trying to stay a step ahead of the cultists pursuing her through an occasionally familiar, occasionally nightmarish landscape.

Some onscreen text early in the film clarifies what’s happened before the film’s opening: the Rapture has taken place, for one thing, and a number of religious zealots have opted to make themselves mute in order to please an angry God. Most of the characters we meet, including Weaving’s character and her boyfriend/husband/partner, are mute, and the way that Katz and his collaborators use sound — and get most of the storytelling across without any dialogue — is impressive. The forest where most of the film is set is similarly evocative and primal, and that’s before the unsettling beings who live there — think severely burned cannibal zombies — show up. There’s one sequence in which a host of cultists engage in rhythmic, ecstatic breathing that was deeply unnerving to watch.

At its best, Azrael taps into a primal nightmare logic, especially in the early going, when Weaving’s character and her paramour are abducted by cultists and she begins searching for him. But while the central concept is strong, there are a few moments where I found myself wishing for a little more clarity — or at least more of a sense of how this particular world worked.

There’s a sequence partway through the film where Katz hints at how the larger world has been getting on since the Rapture took place. While the cultists live in a ramshackle camp, the introduction of an outsider suggests that some form of functional civilization has continued, albeit in tension with the mute cultists in the woods.

Katz and his collaborators use the lack of intelligible dialogue effectively, for the most part, but in a film where the setting and history are so important, I also found more and more questions piling up. If the cultists were so opposed to the idea of speech, why didn’t they adopt ASL or make use of written language to communicate? The film’s summary also states that Weaving’s character was an exile from the cult; this was never entirely clear to me, nor why tracking her down was so important to her former cohorts. And while a couple of shots that showed the expansive forest where much of the film was set were gorgeous to behold, I also wished the film had offered a better sense of scale. There’s a journey by car that takes place early on; unfortunately, I had little idea if the characters were traveling two miles or two hundred.

There’s a lot I admired about Azrael, and I think that might be at the heart of my criticism of it: it’s well-made enough that I wanted everything to reach the same high bar that its best scenes set. I’m on board for whatever Katz and Barrett have in store next, regardless.