Sylvain
Richard is a film critic at Arts & Opinion. He
gave Blood River, which played at the 2009
Fantasia World Film Festival, 3.5 out of 4
stars. For the rest of his ratings, click
HERE.
The
morality tale has been a part of story telling since stories
were first told. Human nature is such that wecannot help but
enjoy watching others struggle with good and evil, sexual
temptation and the unrestricted exercise of power. Witnessing
others fall from great distinction into disgrace is particularly
satisfying, but no less so than vicariously participating
in an undeserving victim's decision to takerevenge on an evil
doer -- on the high road to redemption. What distinguishes
the good morality tale from the banal is its refusal to indulge
the simple good and evil binary, and its wise concession to
the understanding that all compelling stories are best told
through meticulous character development.
Blood
River played to the highest praises at Montreal’s
now world famous Fantasia Film Festival. It tells of a happy
and attractive couple, Clark and Summer, played by Ian Duncan
and Tess Panzer (wife is pregnant) driving through desert
when their car flips. They are seriously hurt, miles away
from help, and have to deal with a heat and dryness that is
almost Biblical in its intensity, until they manage to come
upon a near ghost town called Blood River, where they meet
up with the mysterious hitchhiker Joseph, brilliantly played
by Andrew Howard, who claims he’s a messenger of God,
doing God’s will. Clark and Summer think they are saved
from near death only to discover that Joseph isn’t what
he first appears to be: a friend offering help. Through a
series of masterful strokes, the veneer of mystery and evil
that initially invested Joseph begins to wear thin, as does
the consummate good we assign to Clark and Summer.
Joseph
seems to know all about them, and gradually fleshes out their
fears, suspicions and paranoias. We discover that Clark has
kept an important aspect of his past from Summer, and that
like Joseph, he isn’t all that he seems. As these finely
wrought, albeit twisted characters become more known to us,
we can’t help suspecting that they will be unable to
avoid their destiny, that a happy ending isn’t in script,
that God, wearing Joseph’s robe, will not be necessarily
sympathetic when it comes to rendering judgment -- and he
shall entertain no qualms in letting flow the life sustenance
of his favourite creation: the eternally damned descendents
of Adam and Eve.
Under
the taut directorship of Adam Mason, who previously gave us
Broken and The Devil’s Chair, mystery,
thriller and horror are superbly and seamlessly melded into
an at once reviled and delicious expectation that builds and
swells like a blood vessel about to revolt against the fixed
constraints of its fragile membrane: the fate of the young
couple.
Less
gory than his early work, Blood River has been compared
to Time Keeper (Louis Belanger) and The Hitcher
(Robert Harmon) -- and with good reason. Horror and thriller,
when they are at the top of their game, invariably depend
on expert pacing for their effects. Simon Boyes’s script
along with unexpectedly nuanced performances from Andrew Howard,
Ian Duncan and Tess Panzer slow things down and make their
slippery sexual and degenerately psychological relationships
almost as delectable as the blood the audience has come to
partake in.
Not
to be short shrifted is Mason’s sensitivity to the 4th
character effects of desert landscape conflated with a sometimes
sweet and savage music score that mirrors the heartbeat and
bewildering fear of Clark and Summer as they attempt to find
sure footing in an environment where human nature, tooth and
claw, will have its day.
Blood
River promises a good day at the cinema and an appetite
for Adam Mason’s next. In its penetrating and realistically
unadulterated portrayal of judgment, sin and punishment, Blood
River, on a low budget, sounds a genre high note.
For
the ratings of 2008 Fantasia Film Festival, HERE.
