Snakes but charming

I was the one pushing for Them That Follow with the movie group this week. The ratings for it on Rotten Tomatoes weren't especially high (62/59%) and, after seeing it, I can understand why. It's not an easy film to watch in certain moments and it can leave the rational viewer with the pounding questions: Why? Why is Mara (Alice Englert) staying? Why subject yourself to this ritual? Why do these people believe this stuff? But those questions and the circumstances that surround them are what make the film a compelling story, because they involve three things that many humans have a tough time dealing with: emotion, family, and religion.

Mara is a young woman in the northern mountains of Virginia who is the son of the local pastor of their Pentecostal church. When I say "local", I mean "very", as their community is a tiny hamlet on top of a mountain that is comprised of perhaps three dozen people. They also happen to be members of that sect of Pentecostals who think that handling serpents is a test of faith and demonstration of salvation (The specific verses that are the foundation of this belief are Mark 16: 17-18.) Given the obvious public health objection to people handling venomous animals, it's not difficult to see why the community might be secluded. On top of that, as with many wings of the Holiness movement, other literal interpretations of scripture predominate. Mara has been promised to a man who assists her father regularly in the church and must undergo a ritual of acceptance, during which she struggles with the fact that she's in love with another man in their town who is actually a non-believer. The inevitable familial and personal trauma should be obvious.

The foundations of Christian Protestantism are based in the concept that the church had lost its way and that finding the way back to Christ was the only way to arrest that decay. The proliferation of sects after the initial split was based on cultural differences, changes of interpretation over time, challenging and misunderstood circumstances, and sometimes just a charismatic figure who convinced people to think in a new way. Mara's father, Lemuel (Walton Goggins) plays that type of figure quite well. He's gaunt, driven, conveys a burning intensity with just a glance, and has a commanding baritone. It's easy to see how he could be the focal point of people looking to believe in something greater and even easier to imagine his children not wanting to step past the boundaries he's set for them, even given the natural tendency to rebel as one grows older. Mara, being an only child and without her mother, has no one else to turn to on a regular basis, except Augie (Thomas Mann) whom she cares for, but whose non-belief makes it even more difficult to take that first step outside the door of the family confines. And that's where the story is.

Them That Follow is a story about personal transformation as one grows older; the struggle with viewing the way things have always been with newer, older eyes; family pressure; religious pressure; and the struggle with personal spirituality. These are all very broad and timeless aspects of storytelling, regardless of background or religion (or lack thereof.) But they're also very humanocentric in nature, which means that the film is about the way humans feel about the events happening in their lives. Given those two aspects, I thought it was appropriate that writing-directing team Britt Poulton and Dan Savage (first-timers behind the camera, incidentally) kept the story small. There were no broad statements or events on screen that took place off the mountain. The law was a constant background noise, given the local authorities' interest in preventing people from dying by snakebite, but everything was contained among these few people and how they handled the personal traumas of their lives.

On the one hand, you could suggest that the snakes were the element that made this different from the "small town girl wishes to break away" plot. It's certainly more exotic than the usual fare. But, as interesting as they were, I don't know that the spirituality angle that included them was really that crucial. Certainly, they were important. One example of husband-to-be Garret's (Lewis Pullman) failure in the eyes of some was how difficult he found it to be part of the rituals that defined their religious lives. He was terrified at the prospect of being involved in the hunt for new snakes for the church and was highly uncomfortable when instructed by Lemuel to "treat Mara like a wife" by making her wash his feet in true Biblical style. In contrast, Mara fed and tended to the snakes with indifference and warned Garret during the washing that "There are limits to what I'll let you do to me." Certainly, the inner strength that made Augie reject the devotions of his family and friends matched up better with Mara's determination to be her own person, even under the weight of the pastor in the house. The scene of Mara's own direct experience of snake handling is tense, but perhaps superfluous to the whole. Despite her protestations to Augie ("It's my faith, too!"), her struggle isn't really with her faith. It's whether she can break those bonds that also mean family and what has embodied her entire life for all of her 16 years.

Another performance of note is that of Olivia Colman, who was excellent in The Favorite. In this film, as a devoted follower of Lemuel's but the mother of apostate Augie, she went from having to convey her fervor for the church to a mother's sympathy for Mara's personal travails to genuine terror at what might happen to her dissenting son, both in the community and from her deity. All of that was helped along by the wild, searching eyes that she used as Queen Anne in The Favourite. In the end, when confronted with the fact that the belief system that occupies her every thought may lead to the death of her son, it's fascinating to watch her deal with it in utter confusion but with perhaps a sneaking, cynical understanding that maybe this was always how it was going to end.

Religion is a difficult topic in modern times. It's tricky to tell something that displays a respect for others' beliefs while still calling them into serious question, without descending into outright derision or parody. Those questions of "Why?" are always easier asked by the outside observer than by those actually living the events. Fictional or not, I think Them That Follow did a solid job of conveying that struggle and presenting those questions without taking away from the fact that different humans will always have different answers to them.