Director – Brad Anderson, Screenplay – Will Honley, Producers – Terry Dougas, Billy Hines, Paris Kassidokostas-Latsis & Gary Levinsohn, Photography – Bjorn Charpemtier, Music – Matthew Rogers, Visual Effects – Urban Prairie Post (Supervisor – Darren Wall), Special Effects Supervisor – Casey Markus, Prosthetic Makeup Designer – Steve Newburn, Production Design – Rejean Labrie. Production Company – H2L Productions/Rhea Films/1821 Studios/Thundersnow Pictures.
Cast
Michelle Monaghan (Jess Stokes), Finlay Wojtak-Hissong (Owen Stokes), Skylar Morgan-Jones (Tyler Stokes), Skeet Ulrich (Patrick Stokes), June B. Wilde (Helen Osgood), Danika Frederick (Shelly), Jennifer Rose Garcia (Candice Reece), Sarah Constible (Dr Avery)
Plot
Jess Stokes has separated from her husband Patrick and moved to a farmhouse in Illinois countryside with her two children Tyler and Owen. The children are exploring the area and come across a hollow with a tree in it, although this distresses the dog Pippin who goes missing afterwards. Pippin returns the following night but has turned feral and viciously attacks Owen. Jess rushes Owen to the hospital where she works as a nurse. Owen is ill but the doctors are baffled as to the cause. Jess sees Owen trying to drink the blood from the IV and sneaks him a blood pack, whereupon he makes a recovery. She then insists on taking Owen out of the hospital and back home where she feeds him from blood packs she has stolen from the hospital supply room. However, the missing packs are detected and Jess is left having to use her own blood. Patrick is seeking to take custody of the children and believes that Jess has been using drugs again. Driven by Owen’s increasing hunger, Jess takes the desperate step of offering Helen Osgood, an aging cancer patient who is seeking assisted suicide, a ride home and then imprisoning her to drain her blood.
For some years now, I have been consistently championing the name of director Brad Anderson. Anderson first appeared with the non-genre The Darian Gap (1996) and Next Stop Wonderland (1998), before making his genre debut with the charming time travel romance Happy Accidents (2000). His next film Session 9 (2001), a psycho-thriller set in an abandoned asylum, gained reasonable word of mouth, as did his subsequent effort, the reality blurring The Machinist (2004) starring an anorexic Christian Bale. Anderson went onto the non-genre thriller Transsiberian (2008) and the cryptic last people on Earth film Vanishing on 7th Street (2010), before having a box-office hit with the Halle Berry psycho-thriller The Call (2013). He followed that with the 19th Century asylum horror Eliza Graves (2014), the thriller Beirut (2018) and the hospital horror Fractured (2019).
I make a point of reading as little about a film as possible before sitting down to watch. I went into Blood blind with nothing more than a plot description – and in truth, that is the best way to make the film work for you so that you can appreciate its unveiling surprises. Brad Anderson sketches out an exceedingly normal domestic scenario with calm understatement. There’s Michelle Monaghan as the mother starting a new life on a farm, trying to connect with and mother her children, while struggling as her ex-husband Skeet Ulrich tries to gain custody of the children using her former drug habit as leverage. It is all delivered with low key drama that makes its point with calm effect.
Owen (Finlay Wojtak-Hissong) driven with a hunger for blood
The early scenes of the sinister looking whorl shaped area at the back of the property; of the dog returned ‘changed’ and with glowing eyes give off a distinct vibe of Pet Sematary (1989). There then comes the point where the everyday charting of Owen’s illness slips over into something else. First we see Michelle Monaghan stealing blood packs from the hospital supply room. After this is stymied, we then see her going to a pet shop and looking at rats “Do you have anything bigger?” and then bringing a rabbit out of the box to slit its throat, before Anderson cuts to a whole line of rabbit carcasses hung up to drain their blood.
And then of course there are the scenes where Michelle Monaghan abducts aging cancer patient June B. Wilde, who has earlier been asking about assisted suicide, and makes her a prisoner in the cellar. The contrasts that go on – Michelle Monaghan’s kind insistence that she be understood alongside June’s desire for die changing to suddenly discovering that she wants to fight back – makes the scenes all the more effective. Added to this, the script delivers a steady progression of twists that keep making things more uncomfortable for Michelle – the blood thefts being detected, her son devouring all her supplies in his ravenous hunger, the daughter finding the cellar, the police coming just as the old lady gets loose, the children dragged away by Skeet Ulrich’s father. It makes for one of the best variations on the vampire film in recent years, even is the word ‘vampire’ is never mentioned once throughout.
