Director/Screenplay/Photography – Perry Blackshear, Producers – MacLeod Andrews, Perry Blackshear, Evan Dumochel & Libby Ewing, Music – Mitch Bain, Visual Effects – Shane Winter. Production Company – Ten Ninety One/Yellow Veil Pictures Ahab and the Dark Productions.
Evan Dumochel (Wilson Shaw), Libby Ewing (Daphne Shaw), MacLeod Andrews (David Castille), Margaret Ying Drake (Anite)
Wilson Shaw lives in an apartment in New York City with his sister Daphne. Wilson has intellectual handicap issues. He returns home to find Daphne dead in her bed. He then sees a figure outside on the fire escape and pursues them. Afterwards however, the police dismiss Daphne’s death as a drug overdose. Wilson becomes obsessed with finding the mystery person. The shadowy hooded figure then attacks Wilson in the street. Back home, Daphne’s ghost appears to Wilson and tells him he must toughen up and train for the upcoming fight with her attacker. She believes it is a demonic figure that has haunted the two of them since they were children.
Perry Blackshear is a directorial talent who should be far better known than he is. I first encountered Blackshear with They Look Like People (2015), an extraordinary micro-budgeted film about a man thinking he was being directed by voices to kill demons. Blackshear next on to make The Siren (2019) about a man’s relationship to a malevolent water sprite. When I Consume You was his third feature-length film. He has also written the script for Gigi Saul Guerrero’s Bingo Hell (2021).
Perry Blackshear makes small intimate films that often take place in an apartment building – like They Look Like People, much of the story here takes place in a dingy New York City apartment. Blackshear also relies on a small coterie of actors – MacLeod Andrews and Evan Dumochel have appeared in all his other films, while Margaret Ying Drake, who played leading roles in his other two films, turns up in a small one-scene appearance as an adoption agency worker.
Blackshear shoots When I Consume You in New York City. The focus is on a harsh realism. Lighting levels are reduced to a dingy grey as though the entire show was being lit by a streetlamp from outside. Much of the show takes place in a one-bedroom apartment. The exterior locations chosen are some of the dreariest and dullest of New York’s backstreets, ones where garbage often seems piled up and strewn everywhere. In many of the early scenes, Blackshear shoots and edits in fragmentary way – a good many handheld street scenes – that more than effectively give you an emotional, almost experiential sense of being there in the midst of the confusion.
There is a purpose to this. Not long after the surprise death of Libby Ewing. Evan Dumochel is in the apartment trying to access her phone when suddenly a hand appears and hovers over the phone and touches the keypad. Not long after, Libby makes a surprise return, sliding out from under the bed. She seems to have no real clue as to how she is there and what she is is a question that hovers over the film. She may be a ghost, yet has a corporeality and is able to strike Dumochel during their training sessions or later when she attacks MacLeod Andrews. She may just be in his imagination – Dumochel is seen talking to her in the street and yet when he interacts with others, she is not there. MacLeod Andrews later refers to her as a disembodied soul so we more or less have to take that as it is.
Perry Blackshear’s are small contained films – ones that rarely seem to involve casts of more than three or four characters. There is also something wild to them – they never head in the directions you expect or conform to any formulaic genre telling. When I Consume You heads off into a wild direction with the introduction of MacLeod Andrews’s detective where he gives a fairly crazed performance in his introductory scene with Evan Dumochel, getting drunk and at one point randomly firing off his gun, all before things go in an unexpected directions altogether.
There are good performances from all three principals, who are entirely convincing in their roles. I was especially impressed with Libby Ewing, a new face to me, who gives a solid-headed, sure performance that makes me interested in keeping an eye on what she does in future.
Trailer here