Maxance Vincent
The less you know about In Our Blood, which had its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival in the Cheval Noir section, the better. The fiction film debut for Oscar-nominated director Pedro Kos, the movie is presented as a found footage ‘documentary’ on the reunion between filmmaker Emily Wyland (Brittany O’Grady) and her mother, Sam (Alanna Ubach).
Teaming up with cameraman Danny (E.J. Bonilla), Emily reunites with her mother during Thanksgiving, who tells her daughter to come and meet her the following day at the rehabilitation center. However, she suddenly goes missing, leading Emily and Danny to investigate her disappearance after the two find a severed pig’s head in their motel bedroom.
That’s as far as I’ll go in describing the film because it works best without you knowing a thing about it. The most brilliant aspect of In Our Blood is how it slowly unravels its mystery, introducing us to how Emily and Danny play with the artifice of cinema (shooting on a professional Sony camera and an iPhone) while they make their documentary.
The initial framing device sounds simple enough, but once Sam goes missing, the duo begins to interview people who knew her, including Ana (Krisha Fairchild), who works at the rehabilitation center Sam visits, and Red (Leo Marks), a devout catholic who may be hiding something. Their documentary then completely changes form and progresses into far darker territory as they pull back the layers of the mystery surrounding the disappearance.
Of course, being known for his documentaries, Kos brilliantly transposes the language he’s developed throughout his career inside a fiction story. None of the camerawork feels ‘staged’. It’s all in service of the immersion Emily and Danny attempt to capture through their film. Even the use of cellphones, which drastically changes the movie’s aspect ratio, adds a level of authenticity to the proceedings, because it constantly changes between Danny and Emily’s point of view.
Emily is far more involved in the picture than Danny and records audio messages at the end of each day to give her opinion on what’s happening before we cut to the following day. Her point of view is far more subjective, though it’s understandable, given her mother being at the center of the movie. In contrast, Danny aims to be more objective and captures things he probably shouldn’t were it not to ‘document’ what’s happening.
Because Emily is more determined to figure out the truth, she makes decisions that do not sit right with Danny, which sets a conflict between the two. Danny does not shoot the movie on his camera like Emily captures footage on her phone, which amps up the tension between the two. In one specific scene, Danny convinces Emily not to do something she will (eventually) regret, but she does it anyway. However, as he follows her into this catastrophic decision, he keeps filming and will do so until they have found what they’re looking for. In a way, they add tension to each other, translating into how they’re constructing their documentary.
The movie then takes a massive left turn into a vastly different genre than what Kos has been setting up. At first, I was slightly disappointed in how facile it had gotten, diluting the brilliant sense of terror slowly building up between Emily and Danny. But it quickly begins to subvert all of our pre-conceived expectations into a twist ending that not only works but makes us want to crave for more. What Kos achieves in his final scene is unlike anything the found footage genre has done, and it’s a bold swing that will hopefully pave the way for something even grander, should the movie have more up its sleeve.
All of this thrilling sense of tension couldn’t have been made possible without two lead performances acting as In Our Blood’s emotional anchor. As Emily, Brittany O’Grady delivers a knockout turn that slowly builds towards a conclusion none of us saw coming. It requires great skill to pull off such a stark shift between the traditional documentary and the left-turn Kos and screenwriter Mallory Westfall has in store for audiences in the final fifteen minutes or so, and yet we’re continuously locked into the story because of our investment in the protagonists.
O’Grady handles this emotional shift with aplomb and delivers a once-in-a-lifetime performance that will catapult her to greater stardom than shows like The White Lotus and The Consultant did. Bonilla is an equal match to her, showcasing a different approach to filmmaking than what Emily wants from her documentary. This creates a palpable dynamic between the two characters as they slowly pull us into their movie, which takes a wildly different ending than their initial objective. This conflict between objective and subjective viewpoints becomes the heart of In Our Blood’s story until the left turn becomes so powerful that the two must put their pre-conceived biases aside and do what they think is best.
Perhaps the ending is too big of a left turn for some audience members to believe, but since it was executed so well and didn’t stray away from the style Kos had established before, I found it incredibly welcomed and, dare I say, audacious. It’s hard for me not to say a word about what exactly occurs, but no one will see it coming, even if the clues that pile up basically spell it out for us before Kos fully pulls back the curtain.
This ingenious twist makes In Our Blood a far more interesting film than if it had stayed in the traditional found footage documentary approach. As a result, the movie posits Pedro Kos as a major force in genre cinema, who has created a world so rich in development it begs to be expanded in subsequent installments. Perhaps this will be the case because I have a feeling that once more eyeballs see the film, their only answer coming out of it will be “More, please.”
SCORE: ★★★1/2
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