Fresh from her Oscar win in The Favourite, Oliva Colman is back, this time going "all indie" in the directorial debut of newcomer scenarists Britt Poulton and Dan Madison Savage. Reminiscent of the earlier 2010 Indie, Winter's Bone, Them That Follow also follows a group of rural folks (this time set in Appalachia).
These "folks" are religious fundamentalists with a church run by pastor Lemuel Childs (Walton Goggins). Childs has everyone under his grip including his daughter Mara (Alice Englert), who briefly falls for the young Augie (Thomas Mann), a local auto mechanic, who has grown disillusioned with Childs' Pentecostal church.
Oh one thing I forgot to mention-the church really is a cult in which parishioners test God's power by embracing poisonous snakes. Clandestine meetings are held to avoid scrutiny by local law enforcement with Childs the number one promoter of an "us against them" mentality.
Colman plays Hope Slaughter, Augie's Mom, and she's just about as fanatical as the pastor. Mara is now towing the party line and agrees to an arranged marriage with Childs' hand-picked suitor, the dutiful sycophant Garrett (Lewis Pullman), who soon learns that Mara is pregnant with Augie's child. Eventually the pastor is forced to expel him from the church after he tries to rape Mara, in revenge for her so-called betrayal.
Most unconvincingly, Augie decides to forsake his contempt for the church and agrees to undergo a ritual snake bite ceremony, in order to prove his love for Mara. After being bitten by a snake during the ceremony, Augie falls deathly ill and even his Mom refuses to countenance the idea of taking him to the hospital. She even goes along with the parishioners who end up sawing off Augie's arm in a last ditch attempt to save his life.
Mara finally comes around at film's end, defies her father (who excommunicates her) and drives Augie to the hospital where presumably he'll be cured. Hope by the way also sees the light and realizes that the drive to the hospital is a "good thing."
Them That Follow is a grim story in which all melodramatic tropes are checked off. Augie is the broken victim and deep down Mara is the angel who realizes the error of her ways after being brainwashed by her evil pastor-dad. The script is strictly "black and white" with few shades of gray. Somehow the characters here need to be more complex, with perhaps the bad guys infused with some charm (as well as humanity) and the good ones, a little less angelic.
All performers manage to acquit themselves nicely, especially Colman who once again does well in the intense part as the obsessed "believer." Them that Follow is a bit slow moving with one too many snake handling scenes, which ends up becoming repetitious.
In the end, one wonders how newcomers Poulton and Savage came up with their sensational story and characters of religious extremism; is it based on an article culled from the tabloids? One gets the impression that the screenwriters really only know of their religious fundamentalist characters from a distance, as they are painted too unsympathetically, with little verisimilitude to boot.
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