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Them That Follow review: Olivia Colman follows The Favourite with a forgettable Bible belt drama

Kaitlyn Dever in Them That Follow
Kaitlyn Dever in Them That Follow

Dirs: Britt Poulton, Dan Madison Savage. Cast: Alice Englert, Olivia Colman, Kaitlyn Dever, Walton Goggins, Thomas Mann, Lewis Pullman, Jim Gaffigan. 15 cert, 98 mins

The presence of a post-Oscar-winning Olivia Colman alone – albeit in an unflashy supporting part – makes an argument for paying attention to the Faulkneresque indie Them That Follow, a tiny film she could easily have made three years ago with barely anyone noticing. But if we expect every Colman appearance henceforth to be on a level with The Favourite, a lot of glum letdowns are in store.

This moody ensemble piece is set in a snake-handling Pentecostal community – the kind still active in the Appalachians – and gives Colman about the fourth biggest role, as an unsmiling mom called Hope Slaughter, caught up in inter-familial strife.

The pastor’s daughter, Mara Childs (Alice Englert) begins the film pregnant – not with the baby of her betrothed, the sexually frustrated Garret (Lewis Pullman), but with that of Hope’s son Augie (Thomas Mann). Yes, the film contains a character named Augie Slaughter, and no one bats an eyelid.

What they’re all busy doing instead is fetching snakes out as a pledge of faith, in the tin-shack church where Pastor Lemuel (a fulminating Walton Goggins) gathers his sheep. Every couple of reels, as trust dwindles and drama intensifies, someone submits to a snake test, and so it is that Augie finds himself bitten and bedridden, denied medical help by the whole herd, including his mother, and with a left arm rapidly swelling to bright-red-watermelon dimensions.

Colman, fretting at her son’s side, does her bit to suggest the anguished clash between faith and reason here, connecting credibly with her co-stars. But it’s not a role anyone will remember she took a year from now. The biggest problem is Mara, a character who seems to drift through her own movie as if half-envenomed or marginally dazed.

Englert’s scenes with Pullman, Mann and Goggins all seem like placeholders where revealing dialogue was meant to go. There’s no cohesion to it as a community portrait – and Kaitlyn Dever, while quite often on screen, has a fruitlessly undeveloped role as Mara’s best friend.

Significant moments – Garret gets arrested at one point – happen without warning off screen, and are reported back to us in messenger-speech fashion. But this doesn’t have the ambition of tragedy or the scope to be more than a gritty actors’ piece.

If it weren’t for the stifling earnestness about patriarchal dogma, you could mistake it for M. Night Shyalaman’s The Village given some kind of vague off-Broadway workshopping, and regurgitated minus the twist.