Mark Reviews Movies: BLOOD QUANTUM

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 27, 2020

Writer/director Jeff Barnaby clearly wants his Blood Quantum to be more than just an ordinary, formulaic zombie movie. In certain ways, it is. There's an undeniable political sentiment beneath the surface and, at times, right there in the dialogue, as a group of indigenous peoples, living in a reservation just across the river from a town, find themselves immune to a sudden plague of zombification.

Barnaby takes his time getting to this ironically subversive idea—that the descendants of the original inhabitants of the land, who have suffered centuries of disenfranchisement and genocide and being assaulted by previously foreign diseases, would suddenly find themselves at a clear advantage over the descendants of those who perpetrated such horrors against them. Because of that history, they know what to be wary about when the outsiders come looking for food and shelter. That blood-stained blanket, in which a girl bitten by a zombie had been wrapped, had better be burned, for example. The historical mistakes won't be made again, and the old tricks aren't going work this time.

The movie eventually arrives at this almost jokey concept, and when Barnaby addresses it directly, the movie is darkly funny, presenting the irony at face value while clearly understanding that the characters' awareness and hesitation come from centuries' worth of death, betrayal, and marginalization. In these moments, Barnaby comes close to presenting a more allegorical tale about history and a reversal of historical injustices, and it's one that just happens to feature zombies.

From the start, though, the movie establishes that it's more the other way around: a story about zombies that just happens to feature some allegorical elements. Our introduction to the entire movie focuses on the zombies. It is clever, though, as a fisherman from the reservation guts several fish, only for one of them, with all of its vital organs spilled on the ground, to begin flopping on the table. The rest of them start doing the same thing.

That's when meet Traylor (Michael Greyeyes), the chief of the reservation's police force. He's divorced from Joss (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers) and has two adult sons—Joseph (Forrest Goodluck) and, from a previous relationship, Lysol (Kiowa Gordon)—who often get into trouble in the town across the bridge.

Seemingly ordinary things, such as Traylor having to put down Joss' mysteriously sickly dog and the two sons being held in the drunk tank across the river, quickly become perilous. Traylor meets up with his father Gisigu (Stonehorse Lone Goeman), the fisherman from the opening, to learn about the undead fish—only to hear something pounding from the trunk of his police cruiser, where there should only be a dead dog. Joseph and Lysol soon discover that a third man in their cell is sick and has a taste for human flesh, and Traylor is called to a scene of domestic violence, where he finds a mother eating her newborn child.

All of this is a lengthy prologue, really, leading up to the main story. Six months later, the town has collapsed to zombies. The indigenous characters have established a fortress at the reservation, and there's a debate about how to handle the increased number of townie migrants, looking for safety among the immune across the river.

The central debate comes down to the two brothers. Lysol has had enough of the outsiders, suddenly dependent on the indigenous people they had shunned, looked down upon, and isolated for so long. "It's us or them," the one brother, fearing that just one infected outsider could result in everyone getting killed, says to the other. Joseph, whose girlfriend Charlie (Olivia Scriven) is pregnant and ready to give birth any day now, believes that, under the present circumstances, there's no longer an "us" and a "them." "It's just us," the other brother argues (The dialogue here is direct, clunky, or both, but at least it does possess ideas behind some of it).

The political debate, though, just becomes a means of getting to more zombie carnage, and much of the material focusing on the interpersonal relationships between these characters quickly transforms into melodrama. Barnaby's relaxed sense of pacing, allowing the characters to have such debates and quieter moments with each other, is certainly appreciated, especially since much of the third act comes down to a lot of blood and gore involving the zombies, called "zeds" by the characters. On an aesthetic level, too, the filmmaker is restrained, creating a world of shadows and capturing the horrors on screen from a distance or in longer takes.

For all of the allegorical potential and formal restraint on display, though, Barnaby's movie does eventually come down to a series of zombie outbreaks (filled with the requisite moments of spraying blood and ripped-out viscera) and standoffs between the major characters. Blood Quantum occasionally suggests the notion of the traditional zombie narrative being used to address deeper ideas, but it ultimately embraces too much of the usual.

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