Exodus (2021)

You Can Drown in an Inch of Water

After this I looked, and there before me was a door standing open in heaven. And the voice I had first heard speaking to me like a trumpet said, "Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.”

Revelation 4:1 (NIV)

I used to hate Terence Malick films, and for good reason: I started with the wrong ones. In his later years, the director of Badlands, Days of Heaven, and The Thin Red Line got really experimental with his visual storytelling. Movies like The Tree of Life, Knight of Cups, and Song to Song sacrificed narrative coherence for an intuitive language of visual poetry.

“Visual poetry”, like any other poetry, can be good or bad. Just because a filmmaker uses a storytelling technique that comes wrapped in a high-falutin, critics-friendly descriptor—doesn’t mean the film itself is intrinsically valuable.* Such was the case (so I thought) with Malick’s second-act oeuvre.

I trashed The Tree of Life, struggled not to conk out during Knight of Cups, and was on suicide watch during Song to Song. Even seeing these on the big screen, surrounded by a loving network of fellow reviewers couldn’t keep me from mentally climbing the walls during Malick’s ponderous, self-indulgent, star-studded slogs.

Later on, three things happened that really turned my life around.

First, I watched Badlands, on the recommendation of dear friend/fellow traveler, Pat McDonald.

Second, thanks to another friend, filmmaker Sujewa Ekanayake, I began to learn about Slow Cinema (which, it turns out, is only partially about deliberate pacing).

Third, by sheer coincidence, I was invited on a podcast to discuss Malick’s Knight of Cups last year.

I’d vowed never to watch that movie again, but thanks to my new appreciation for Malick and a months-long education in Slow Cinema, I was treated to a film I’d never really seen. Though I’d sat through it once before, the difference between viewings was like visiting France as a tourist versus visiting France after having taken college-level French courses.

Some movies make very little sense at arm’s length. But if you’re willing to embrace them intellectually and spiritually, rich tapestries of ideas and emotion can emerge.

It goes the other way, too.

Co-writer/director Logan Stone’s Exodus begins with one of the most fascinating premises I’ve seen in awhile. Seven years after The Rapture, the residents of a small town live under a mysterious totalitarian regime. The names of people who have tried to escape are announced on loudspeakers; deputized citizens interrogate those who’ve returned to the town voluntarily after having experienced the harsh and disorienting desert beyond the safety of civilization.

These agents of the state wear red fabric knotted around their arms. There are no fancy uniforms or slick dystopian monuments to fascism. Like most things in this low-key post-apocalypse society, what we see of this new version of American life is not so much designed as cobbled together, a makeshift 1984 with a suburban Lord of the Flies aesthetic.

After grilling a newly returned escapee, one of the interrogators, Connor (Jimi Stanton), discovers a VHS tape that offers clues to The Door—a mythical floating portal in the middle of the desert that many believe is the escape route from this Earthbound purgatory. The tape carries with it a warning that reality will become distorted the closer one gets to The Door, almost like psychedelic bread crumbs.

Connor decides to pursue this lead, to see if there’s any truth to the rumors. After leaving his dialysis-confined brother with a friend, he begins his quest and is secretly followed by The Emissary, another government agent, played by Janelle Snow.

From here, Exodus flips ahead from its Old Testament namesake to the back of the Good Book, indulging in the kind of abstract Revelation-style “visual poetry” that has confounded religious scholars for centuries. Connor encounters a man in chains; a buzzard on a park bench; a couple in a van with a bizarre connection to The Emissary; and a blue rope that sporadically appears beneath his dirt-stained boots.

Reality does, in fact, change on a dime, but at 75 minutes it’s difficult to understand what these characters are going through, what their relationships are to one another, or if getting to (and through) The Door will provide any kind of satisfactory conclusion to the preceding drama. I won’t give away the ending, except to say that it likely meant something to Stone and co-writer Andrew Arcos, but not to me.

That’s a damned shame. For the first twenty minutes, Exodus invited me to wonder what great secrets the filmmakers had in store regarding this frightening new world and its mythical pathway to hope. But given the way the rest of the film plays out, I’m not even sure what Stone and Arcos mean by “The Rapture”.

Did all of the “good” people really ascend to Heaven? Is evil really running amok on Earth until Jesus returns for the Final Judgment? I mean, sure it’s no fun living under an authoritarian regime, but as depicted, this “great tribulation” doesn’t seem much worse than UK’s COVID lockdowns.

And what, exactly, is behind that floating door?

For all I know, it could be Gabriel or The Gunslinger.

This is one of those rare and very frustrating movies that plays as if every third scene was left on the cutting room floor. Despite very good performances by the main cast, and some truly wonderful photography (the slow-rolling dust storm belongs right up there with Mad Max: Fury Road), I just couldn’t find anything to latch onto during a back half that’s as inscrutable as it is interminable. I suspect I’d have to interrogate Stone and Arcos about their intentions in order to fill in those gaps.

Is it possible that, like my earlier experiences with unconventional, artsy narratives, I might someday revisit Exodus?

Sure.

But if I don’t, it’s not the end of the world.

*George Lucas famously tried to cover up the fact that he’d essentially copied his original Star Wars trilogy to create his Prequel Trilogy by saying, “It’s like poetry, sort of. They rhyme.”