Blood on Her Name [2019]
“Some things can’t be undone.”
Allow me to begin that no 85-minute, directorial and writerorial[?] debut, character-driven crime drama has any right to be as good as Blood on Her Name. What Matthew Pope and Don M. Thompson have brought to the otherwise overly saturated, drawl-stricken genre of small-town southern crime is nothing short of exceptional. It’s rare that films utilize every minute of their runtime efficiently and it’s even more rare that those that do are helmed by a duo with so little experience under their collective belt.
Blood begins mere moments after most films decide their journeys should start, and we open with the results of an action that will set the entire film in motion; rather than the action itself. We don’t get to see what happened, only the results… and immediate panic ensues. From the outset of the film we’re rushed through events and decisions at the same speed our characters are making them and are eventually led to the unraveled truth underpinning everything by the end. It’s a brilliant, almost Tarantino-esque method of storytelling that forces the viewer to live in the moment without giving them a chance to catch their breath. Blood builds its world and defines the internal struggle of our main character in such a deeply intelligent way that it may not be obvious what exactly happened in the first minutes until much later.
The screenplay for Blood must have been mistaken for a Wagyu at some point during its construction because each line, character, and setting has been so delicately crafted and fine tuned that it has to have been hummed to sleep each night while laying under its own cow-shaped weighted blanket. Like the aforementioned coddled bovine, Blood is not without its sharp edges and occasional ponderous moments, however. Those moments are easily ignored though, when you stop to consider how human its characters are.
Oftentimes, crime dramas are riddled with the same tropes over and over again like some Hallmark holiday film where the flannel-wearing-small-town-guy is actually a murderer with a heart of gold and the stuck-up-city-boy is a cop with nothing to show his dad for “bring your emotionally abusive father to work day”. Blood on Her Name not only avoids those tropes with subtle and very alive characters, but manages to be redolent of another great in this genre in the form of Denis Villeneuve’s 2013 crime masterpiece [and one of my all time favorite films], Prisoners.
There isn’t a lot more to say about Blood on Her Name except that it’s put a new writer, in the form of Don M. Thompson, and a director, who goes by Matthew Pope, on my radar as “must watch” filmmakers. There’s too much intelligent design behind the approaches to this film for me to fear it may be the proverbial lightning in a bottle that you see with some first-timers and I'm very excited for what the future holds here.
From performances by lesser-knowns in Bethany Anne Lind as our lead, to one of the actors everyone recognizes but no one can name in Will Patton, a score so subtle you’ll forget it was guiding you along, and some truly sharp editing; Blood on Her Name is not only worth your time, but it is worth your time right this very minute.
“Living with something like this is a sonofabitch… But it’s living.”
