‘Blood Shine’ Is a Horror Film With an Unusual Amount of Taste

Should an intrepid filmmaker or playwright think to write a drama centering on the 15th-century Italian woman, Selvaggia Sassetti, they won’t have too many specifics to work with. She was the fifth daughter of Francesco, a banker working for the Medici family whose lax managerial style was a significant factor in their financial downfall. The Sassetti Chapel at Santa Trinita in Florence doesn’t tell us much about the children, though a portrait by Davide Ghirlandaio testifies to Selvaggia’s beauty.The female lead of “Blood Shine,” Emily Bennett, would be an ideal candidate for an entertainment featuring the Sassetti family. She bears an uncanny resemblance to the Florentine noblewomen, an attribute accentuated by Justin Brooks’ cinematography. Then again, why wouldn’t Mr. Brooks suffuse the leading lady with an otherworldly luminescence? Ms. Bennett isn’t only the star of the movie, she also co-wrote and co-directed the picture with Mr. Brooks, who, as it happens, is her husband. The couple’s first collaboration, “Alone With You” (2021), met with mixed reviews. Was it really, as a sage at RogerEbert.com had it, amateurish, indulgent and inelegant? None of those pejoratives can be applied to “Blood Shine.”As cinema, the picture is economical in its outlines and poetic in effect. It’s a horror film that will push the buttons of genre fans, but that also hearkens to efforts like Carl Dreyer’s “Day of Wrath” (1943), Ingmar Bergman’s “The Virgin Spring” (1960) and Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon” (2009). A beguiling mixture of gravitas and the grindhouse, you might say. A cold open sets the parameters as a farmhand and ex-con looking for work, Keith (Brendan Sexton III), comes across an isolated house in upstate New York. His truck has quit on him, and he goes knocking on the door to seek help. The lone resident, Clara (Ms. Bennett), is hesitant about inviting a stranger into the house, but she errs on the side of charity. Clara brews a pot of tea, Keith makes a sexual overture and, before you know it, the latter is dead and the former is covered in blood.Cut to the Manhattan office of movie director Brighton West (David Call). Though he’s made a name as a profitable director of a monster movie franchise, Brighton is eager to break free of the constraints hewing to the formula. We get a glimpse of something dreadfully arty that he’s been working on. We also learn that Brighton is old school in his hiring practices, utilizing a nearby couch to help cast his latest ingenue. Still, the man is frazzled: Brighton heads out of the city, having decided that communing with nature will set him right. He promises to check in regularly with his agent on the progress of the latest project.The hamlet in which Brighton finds himself is beautiful, but he can’t get his head together. A barkeep at a local watering hole recommends a scenic location out in the woods, and scenic it is, particularly when he espies a nude Clara bathing in a mountain stream. After taking a number of photos on the sly, Brighton is rendered abruptly unconscious and later finds himself in Clara’s kitchen having tea.At this point in the story, we know well enough about this home brew, and Brighton’s advances on the ethereal young woman are thwarted by its narcotic effects. When he awakens, the auteur finds himself chained in a dark room at the whim of Clara. She has, as it turns out, some peculiar ideas about salvation. Grim tidings are afoot, and if the pressures Clara subjects Brighton to are unpleasant, the story grounds them in religious tidings that would, I think, have piqued the interest of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.“Blood Shine” is, in its emphasis on purity and repentance, emphatically American in ethos, and stumbles only in a denouement that is too strongly indebted to, fancy that, a British venture, Robin Hardy’s “The Wicker Man” (1973). Up until then, Ms. Bennett and Mr. Brooks weave a finely honed if, at times, excruciating tension from a slim conceit. The film that won’t be to all tastes, but it has more taste than you might imagine.

‘Blood Shine’ Is a Horror Film With an Unusual Amount of Taste

‘Blood Shine’ Is a Horror Film With an Unusual Amount of Taste

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