Mark Reviews Movies: BLOOD ON HER NAME

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 27, 2020

When we first meet Leigh Tiller (Bethany Anne Lind), she is in shock. Standing on the shop floor of the auto garage she owns and runs, Leigh has no idea what to do. She hears a noise. Someone else must be there, but when she calls out the name of the person she expects, there's no answer—only an open door, leading out into a rainy night.

On the floor, there's a canister of gasoline, overturned and spilling out its contents. A bit further into the shop, there something else spilling out its contents. It's the dead body of a man, lying on the floor with an increasing pool of blood gathering around the head.

Leigh, noticing the lights outside, closes the garage door, just as a car, with the face of a young girl staring out its window as she makes shapes on the foggy window, is about to pass. That's it. No one, as far as we can tell, knows that Leigh is standing here with a dead body. It's time for her to make a decision.

That's how Blood on Her Name, a tough-minded film about conscience and guilt and how old sins come to define the new ones from co-writer/director Matthew Pope, begins. We know nothing, except the undeniably troubling presence of that dead body. Did Leigh kill him? If she did, was it murder or self-defense?

If it was murder, it makes sense that, as she does, she doesn't finish that call to 9-1-1, but if it was murder, why would start to make that call in the first place? If it was self-defense, why doesn't she finish the call, and why does she proceed to wrap up the body in a tarp, secured with duct tape, and drive the lifeless man to a river in the woods.

Pope and Don M. Thompson's screenplay boils down to one, big two-part question: Why does Leigh do what she does, and more importantly, what do those actions say about her as a person? They're inseparable quandaries: The person defines the actions, and the actions define the person. There are also, of course, no easy answers to either of those questions. Leigh's actions are inherently contradictory—an innocent person doing things to make her look guilty or a guilty person doing things that could and likely would implicate her in the crime. There's only one answer, as simplistic as it may be, to rationalize such behavior and such a person: Leigh herself is a contradiction.

The story here is a mystery, in that Pope and Thompson gradually reveal key pieces of information to explain the dead man's identity, how he ended up dead, and how Leigh wound up in her garage with the dead man. That's not what's vital to the story of the film, though. Everything really revolves around Leigh—her actions, her character, her recent past, and what happened so long ago to make her the sort of person who would behave, no matter what the truth really is, in such seemingly contradictory ways.

The most important decision here is that, despite bringing the body out on a river in a boat, Leigh doesn't dispose of the corpse. A random phone call on the dead man's cellphone makes her think twice. This man had a family—a son, who's calling because he's worried about his dad, and a girlfriend, the son's mother. The sun is coming up, and Leigh returns to the garage with the body and the man's car—covered with a tarp. Her ultimate plan is to return the man's body to his family, making sure that nothing can connect her to him.

It's a mystery, then, about the dead man and Leigh's involvement in his death, but the film is also a thriller, as Leigh has to cover up her conscience-spurred act of basic decency, lest anyone look to her about what happened. Complicating matters is that her father Richard (Will Patton) is the local Sheriff, who knows a thing or two about cover-ups.

Then, there's Leigh's son Ryan (Jared Ivers), who's currently on probation for beating a classmate who insulted the son's father—Leigh's ex-husband, who is currently serving time in prison for running stolen cars through the shop. Ryan, as it turns out, was there on the night of the man's death, but telling her son that it was just a random robbery attempt, Leigh insists—to her son and to everyone who notices the cuts on her face—that the man ran away when he realized there was nothing to steal.

Leigh's lies pile up as the truth—of who the man was, how he was connected to Leigh, and what actually happened—becomes clearer. Such a story easily could become bogged down by the gradual drip of information or the potentially shaky mechanics of how Leigh goes about covering up things. The gradual drip, though, is necessary, because the film is as much about Leigh's lies to herself—about her past, her fears for her son, and her own qualities/flaws as a person—as it is about revealing the truth. The shakiness of Leigh's motives and actions is necessary, too, because this story is about how the crimes, errors, and mistakes of the past continue to have consequences in the distant and immediate future.

First and foremost, it's a film about a character—a study of guilt and remorse and fear and the lengths to which someone will go to justify what he or she has done. In Lind's performance, a great piece of internalized acting, Blood on Her Name rings true through the character's lies and contradictions.

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