Mark Reviews Movies: BLOOD (2023)

Blood, Vertical Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 26, 2023

Some actors simply don't get the chances they deserve, and Blood shows again that Michelle Monaghan is one of them. Here, she plays Jess, a divorced mother of two, a nurse, and a recovering addict to prescription pain medication. That description might make this sound like some kind of domestic drama about Jess' everyday struggles with parenting, custody battles, and her condition, but the real setup arrives when Jess' younger child develops something akin to vampirism. The mother has to keep her son healthy and alive by increasingly illegal and awful means.

There's nothing particularly unique or special about the premise, the resulting plot by screenwriter Will Honley, or the way director Brad Anderson executes the mounting dread of this situation. It's mostly pretty generic and familiar, apart from the understated connection between the main character's addiction and her son's condition, as well as—and more importantly—the complete conviction Monaghan brings to material that's otherwise pretty thin and might have come across as silly without her presence. It's still pretty outlandish in certain regards, to be sure, but Monaghan's work serves as a solid grounding influence for and a distraction from most of it.

After a nasty divorce from a husband (played by Skeet Ulrich) who cheated on her and now has a new baby with that other woman (played by Danika Frederick), Jess has moved to her family's old farm in the middle of nowhere. She has primary custody of her two children, elder daughter Tyler (Skylar Morgan Jones) and son Owen (Finlay Wojtak-Hissong), but that status is tenuous.

After all, Jess was addicted to prescription painkillers for a stretch, although apparently the custody case was a matter of her ex-husband's word against hers after she became sober. If anything goes wrong, though, the ex could end up with sole custody of the kids, so Jess has become quite protective.

She's not protective enough, of course, to pay attention to the family dog staring toward, barking at, and chasing after some unseen thing in the forest surrounding the farm. There's a local legend about that vague something-or-other in the woods, and when the kids go down to what used to be an old fishing hole, they find a mysterious and eerie tree with an ominous hole in the trunk. Sure enough, the dog goes for it and, later, runs away into the forest, only to return as a very changed animal.

The dog, with its eyes glowing yellow, bites Owen. At the hospital where Jess works, the grisly but manageable bite becomes something much worse. It's a kind of anemia, but traditional blood transfusion don't help. Jess catches her son drinking blood directly from the bag, and when she realizes that's only thing keeping him alive, the mother sets out to hide her son's condition and find more blood for the boy to consume.

One of the cleverer bits is that Jess' experience as an addict, finding pills and hiding her condition as much as possible, makes her an ideal person to accomplish this goal. She knows how to take things—like packets of blood—from storage in the hospital without being caught. She also can come up with stories and excuses for why Owen stops going to school, why he should miss out on a visitation with his father, and how his health seems to alter, for good or for ill, without any medical explanation.

The main thrust of this, of course, is that Jess has to keep the blood coming—first from the hospital but, when that source is eliminated, later from animals from pet stores and beyond that. All of this is predictable, right down to the not-so-random set up of a terminally ill woman (played by June B. Wilde) who has no family and wants to die before her sickness becomes worse (The shift in that character, apparently from Jess' clichéd pep talk, adds a layer of irony and a severe moral complication when the script finally gets around to her only purpose in the story), and that's why Monaghan's performance is so important to any kind of success.

She's instantly sympathetic—not only as a mother desperate to keep her children, but also as someone struggling with the guilt, shame, and uncertainty of her recent past—and somehow maintains that quality, even as Jess' actions and behavior become more extreme, dangerous, and willing to harm others. A significant part of that is the no-nonsense element Monaghan brings to the character, in that Jess figures out what's happening with her son immediately and instantly knows what she must do to protect him. There's a level of reflexive determination to the character. That prevents us from asking a few of the more obvious questions about the nature of Owen's disease and the mechanics of her plan—questions that could otherwise make this story come across as nonsensical as it is predictable.

Still, Blood is pretty unsurprising in how things unfold and doesn't attempt to dig any deeper than the complications of its plot. Monaghan is capable of a lot, but although no fault of hers, elevating this material beyond those shortcomings isn't one of those things.

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