Angelina Jolie’s ‘Without Blood’ Fights On, Largely Unseen

Angelina Jolie’s “Without Blood” is a two-character dialogue piece (Salma Hayek and Demián Bichir) about murder and guilt and grappling with a dark past. It’s a modest enterprise that was filmed in Italy four years ago and has been sitting on the shelf all this time before finally opening last week.It’s one of those earnest, weight-of-the-world, soul-baring, meditation movies, made without the slightest interest in attracting even a small audience. There was never a faint hope of this, at least not as far as Joe and Jane Popcorn were concerned. I saw “Without Blood” on Saturday afternoon at a White Plains Apple multiplex, and there was no one else in the theater. At one point I got up and did some leg-stretching exercises. True to solemn form, Ms. Jolie’s film, which she wrote and directed, is based on Alessandro Baricco’s 2002 novella, “Senza sangue,” about a mature woman Nina (Ms. Hayek) confronting an older gent (Mr. Bichir) who helped murder her highly educated physician father and her older brother during a nondescript wartime incident, back when she was a toddler. I had done my homework so I was waiting for any sign of edge or energy. Alas, nothing manifested along these lines. Ms. Hayek’s Spanish-accented dialogue was only occasionally discernible. I felt an immediate kinship with Gene Hackman’s private detective, Harry Moseby, in Arthur Penn’s 1975 film “Night Moves,” when he said, “I saw an Eric Rohmer film once … it was kind of like watching paint dry.”Is “Without Blood” inept? No, it’s technically fine. Seamus McGarvey’s cinematography delivers an arthouse amber-sepia bath. It uses handsome yesteryear sets and is steadily, if slowly, paced and is performed with professional assurance as far as it goes. But Ms. Jolie’s movie just lies there, and I just sat there in my cushy seat, listening intently, suspended in the tepid depths of the thing. I was watching it with an existential space-cadet attitude.Who would make such a bloodless, soul-stifling, out-to-lunch film? To what end? The 51-year-old Angelina Jolie became a hot-ticket actress roughly 30 years ago and then segued into directing 15 years ago with “In the Land of Blood and Honey.” But as she’s gotten older and — one could argue — angrier, her personal stuff has far outweighed her generic commercial appeal.Salma Hayek Pinault, Demián Bichir, and Angelina Jolie attend a “Without Blood” New York screening on September 14, 2026. Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Brainstorm MediaMuch of Angelina Jolie’s inner fire has been focused on humanitarian causes for the last 15-plus years. There’s obviously nothing wrong with that. But fairly or unfairly, she’s also come to be regarded as an obsessive eccentric. Over the last decade Ms. Jolie has seemingly committed herself and her kids to hating on, and essentially excommunicating, ex-husband Brad Pitt since that drunken airplane incident in 2016. (That was totally Mr. Pitt’s fault, although he has become sober in its wake until recently.) Just as Ms. Jolie once sued to have the last name of her estranged infidel father, Jon Voight, legally removed from her records, four of her children have sought to have “Pitt” removed from their legal names. Who in the world believes that Brad is as “bad” as she seems to believe, or that he’s even necessarily “bad” at all, as in malevolent, unredeemable, and deserving of damnation? And consider this. As a director who chooses or sculpts her own preferred material, Jolie has now made four films about innocents suffering horribly under the yoke of violent evil forces. The one exception has been 2015’s “By the Sea,” a marital discord drama she directed, wrote and costarred in with then-husband Mr. Pitt. The evil characters in the four suffering-innocence flicks have all been brute males. ”In the Land of Blood and Honey” (2011) focused on a Bosnian Muslim woman (Zana Marjanovic) coping with the Serbian genocide. “Unbroken” (2014) was largely about an American soldier (Jack O’Connell) being sadistically beaten and brutalized in a Japanese prison camp.Then came “First They Killed My Father” which deals with the Khmer Rouge’s genocide in Cambodia in the mid-1970s. And now “Without Blood,” which is clearly cut from the same cloth.Four movies about innocents suffering the pains of hell under the yoke of evil forces, directed by the same person within the last 17 years. Doesn’t this tell us something? Digging deeper, could the various “brute males” be substitute stand-ins for Jon Voight, who cheated on Ms. Jolie’s mother (the late Marcheline Bertrand) and left the family when Ms. Jolie was barely a year old? Or for Brad Pitt, the ultimate fallen angel in Ms. Jolie’s mind — a dude who will forever be bonded in her psychology with acts of a sulphur-breathing Satan? Then there was the tabloid rumor about Brad Pitt and “Allied” costar Marion Cotillard having had an on-set affair which was emphatically denied all around.No matter how you slice it there’s no questioning that Angelina Jolie seems somewhat consumed these days. Does she live in order to hate, condemn, and instruct the world in the ways of awful men?If reporters were to press the character of Detective David Mills, the anti-hero of David Fincher’s “Se7en,” played of course by Brad Pitt, about who or what Ms. Jolie has become in recent years, his reply might be something along the lines of, “Just because the woman’s got the United Nations and other humanitarian groups lending official support doesn’t make her Mother Teresa!” And, on the evidence of “Without Blood,” he would have a point.

Angelina Jolie’s ‘Without Blood’ Fights On, Largely Unseen

Angelina Jolie’s ‘Without Blood’ Fights On, Largely Unseen

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