Just ask Gonzalo Tamayo (Álvaro Ogalla) the protagonist of Spanish director Federico Veiroj’s The Apostate. When we meet him he’s at his local Catholic Church in hopes getting his baptism certificate. He’s not interested in diving deeper into the church or religion, but rather to officially leave the church, renouncing his faith in order to separate himself from the higher institutional powers.
There’s plenty of reasons for Gonzalo to remove himself from organized religion, including his stalled nature as an adult, still lingering in school and not quite at the point of life that his mother (Vicky Peña) had hope, not matter how supportive she may be. He lingers in his dreams, desiring his cousin Pilar (Marta Larralde) and slipping into dreams of nudist hangouts that offer him a more freeing lifestyle than the life of a Catholic that his parents chose for him.
Although his life isn’t quite in check, Gonzalo spends many afternoons tutoring his neighbors child Antonio (Kaiet Rodríguez). The irony that Veiroj leaves for us isn’t hard to pick-up on. While it does ponder on some interesting ideas, it doesn’t quite enact the smirk that it may have left on the director when he was reading the script.
The Apostate goes about its business in an unorthodox manner that asks interesting questions, it’s too dry and sluggish in its execution that I was never pulled in enough to care.
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