With their last feature, Alone With You, Emily Bennett and Justin Brooks demonstrated a knack for getting the most out of a little, delivering an effective piece of psychological horror from within the confines of a single apartment. With Blood Shine, their more expansive follow-up, the setting is a little bit bigger, but the intimacy remains, along with a genuine sense of artistic growth.
An unnerving, psychosexual horror film with a touch of the metaphysical and a few choice moments of body horror madness, Blood Shine is the next step forward for Bennett and Brooks’s creative and personal partnership. It doesn’t always hit the mark, but its ambition, visual beauty, and genuinely unnerving narrative help to make it another compelling outing from some of indie horror’s finest.
Bennett, who also co-wrote the film, stars as Clara, a woman living in seclusion on a farm in upstate New York. Clara’s seclusion is very much by design, and not just because she enjoys being alone. As a member of a secretive, esoteric cult which worships light itself, she leads an ascetic life, pushing away her baser urges in the hope of one day escaping the prison of her body and joining the light.
Clara’s solitude is broken when horror filmmaker Brighton West (David Call) drops into her life. Brighton was once the hottest new director in the genre, but now he’s trapped in franchise purgatory, producing sequels he doesn’t want to make instead of passion projects that he can’t get out of his head. To fulfill his obligations to the studio, he heads upstate to finish his latest script, only to encounter Clara, who promptly locks him away and subjects him to a series of bizarre, painful rituals, initiating him into her world for her own purposes.
The more Brighton bleeds, the more they bleed together, the more the unlikely pair form a strange, dangerous bond.
This setup primes the film to function largely – aside from scene-stealing guest star appearances from indie horror legends like Larry Fessenden and Toby Poser – as a two-person play, with much of the action unfolding in a single room where Brighton waits each day for Clara’s next ritual. Bennett and Brooks’ script is brimming with confidence in this setup, and works especially well when it contrasts Clara’s dominant stance inside Brighton’s prison with her uncertainty, fear, and perceived impurity outside of that power dynamic.
If there’s a weak point in the script, it’s that it sometimes feels like it’s spinning its wheels in this regard, keeping Clara in one emotional space a bit too long in order to facilitate the next big leap forward, but these are passing concerns. This is a smart piece of storytelling not just in terms of what’s scripted, but in terms of how much the film seems to trust its performers.
It’s here that Bennett gets to really show her paces as an actor, and she delivers what might be the best performance I’ve ever seen from her as a woman on the brink of a breakthrough who’s nevertheless tortured by past failures, present urges, and a zealous streak that’s cost her any chance at a normal life. She simmers with these emotions, lets them roil over her face and then pushes them back. It’s remarkable work, and Call matches her beat for beat, playing a man with an undeniable misogynist streak who finally has to not just feel, but understand what it’s like on the other side of the power imbalance. Together they make for a consistently compelling pair, even when the script occasionally stumbles.
Visually, too, Blood Shine manages to, well, shine. Light is, naturally, a key motif for a film like this, but Bennett and Brooks don’t simply go for the obvious and bathe their characters in sun. After all, for light to matter, darkness also has to be present, and so the sun cuts through the frame like a knife, jetting out into dark rooms in controlled beams from carefully placed windows. Then, the directors take the light’s metaphorical presence even deeper by making the connection between light and filmmaking, and the ways in which filmmakers are able to harness the power of light to tell stories. Within that thematic throughline, the film does some very unnerving things visually, and that’s before the blood and body horror kick in. When things get messy, Bennett and Brooks lose none of their visual flair, turning the film’s violence into a maelstrom of faith, lust, and epiphany.
Blood Shine has its stumbles, particularly in the middle as the narrative sort of swirls around itself in search of an exit, waiting for the third act to uncoil, but what it lacks in narrative clarity it more than makes up for in sheer emotional and visceral force. Two of indie horror’s rising stars just got brighter, and I can’t wait to see what Bennett and Brooks make next.
Blood Shine arrives August 21 in theaters and on Digital.
