There are two skilled performers making the best of their underwritten roles in Them That Follow, a rather dull slab of Appalachian dirge premiering at this year’s Sundance film festival. One is the never not welcome Olivia Colman, fresh off receiving her first Oscar nomination for The Favourite. The other is a snake.
Both are ferociously committed, even terrifying at times, and both deserve far more than this frustratingly lifeless attempt to provide insight into a specific community, rarely seen on screen. We’re in the world of Pentecostal snake-handlers, deep in the wilderness, and a congregation led by pastor Lemuel (Walton Goggins, on autopilot). His daughter Mara (Alice Englert) is being prepped for marriage to a local boy, whom she has little interest in, while she tries to limit her affection for the non-believing son of gas station attendant Hope (Colman). Mara has a secret that weighs heavy and threatens to destroy the lives of those around her.
There’s an initial curiosity with Them That Follow, an intrigue at what we might discover and learn when spending 98 minutes in a world most of us know very little about. But not long into writer-directors Britt Poulton and Dan Madison Savage’s first feature, interest starts to dissipate. It’s a torturous slow-burn that expects us to invest in a lead character of profound emptiness who finds herself in a soapy scenario that plays out with little panache or ingenuity. Englert is a hologram of a character, stuck in a cycle of ponderous sub-Malickian scenes of staring at nature that don’t even possess the aesthetic appeal to make them visually interesting, requiring a great deal of patience from even the most patient of viewers.
Her forbidden affair, which the film later prioritises and romanticises, is inert, constructed in about two abruptly handled scenes, one of which is conducted with such open stupidity that it leads to a predictably staged confrontation with Colman’s impassioned believer. But even when she is given very little, Colman makes the most. She struggles with an American accent but she adds fire to whatever scene she crops up in, elevating the film around her with conviction and ferocity. While her performance in The Favourite has been deservedly lauded for its comic appeal, it’s also an underrated dramatic turn and here Colman reminds us of that particular set of skills, harking back to her game-changing turn in Tyrannosaur.
And then there’s those snakes. With the film rumbling on at such a low level, a sequence involving a snake bite and the resulting fallout does prove involving although acts as the impetus for a sudden lurch into melodrama. There’s such a confounding lack of atmosphere or tension throughout that when the pulpy stuff arrives, it lands with a thud. There were walkouts here before one act of brutality but given how detached and lethargic the plot had been up until then, the decision to leave was entirely understandable.
Poulton and Savage ultimately show very little interest in delving into the community they’ve chosen to depict. It would be kind to call the script’s characterisation slight, more realistic to refer to it as non-existent while third act learnings are identical to any other film about an extremist religious faction. It’s very hard to imagine Them That Follow existing outside of its lo-fi Sundance bubble. It’s competently made but utterly vacant, a forgettable indie fading fast.
Them That Follow is showing at the Sundance film festival
