In Our Blood had its European première Friday 7 March at the Glasgow Film Festival for FrightFest
“I can’t be part of this system anymore,” says a clearly upset Emily Wyland (Brittany O’Grady) directly into the camera, with bloodstains visible on her shirt. This is the opening scene of Pedro Kos’ In Our Blood, and although Emily holds up two keys which she slots together in her hands, we do not yet have even one, and are left mystified – and therefore intrigued – by this context-free confessional. As the footage rapidly rewinds to Day One, and the principal narrative begins, all that we know – although we really already knew it from the film’s title – is that there will be blood.
Emily is an amateur LA filmmaker who has hired cameraman Danny Martinez (E.J. Bonilla) to accompany and record her return to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where, summoned by a letter, she is hoping to make peace with her junkie mother Sam (Alanna Ubach) from whom she has been estranged since she was 13 years old. Wide-eyed, twitchy Sam insists that she is now clean, even as her somewhat manic behaviour suggests otherwise. “History is really heavy here,” Sam says – and not only must she and Emily come to terms with their tangled past (“She’s not a bad person,” Emily tells Daniel, “she just made a lot of bad choices and hurt a lot of people”), but Daniel has a parallel history of family dysfunction and cross-border dealing that is inscribed in the gangster tattoos still on his body, like traces of a problematic past that he can cover over but never quite erase. And at night, Emily sends secret reports to a third party, hinting at her own hidden side and double agency, as though her every move is being directed by outside (yet internalised) forces.
The next day, Emily and Daniel take up an invitation to join Sam at the rehab centre where she is now gainfully employed. There the pair meets the programme director Ana Stuart (Krisha Fairchild) and also some local homeless folk – including the manic, god-fearing Red (Leo Marks). Sam herself, though, does not show up, and as the hours pass, Emily realises that what she and Danny are filming may be not so much a reconciliation with her mother as an investigation into her ever more alarming absence. It will turn out that others in Sam’s circle have also recently been disappearing, and as a bizarrely threatening message is left in their motel room, Emily decides, very much against Daniel’s advice, to confront local cartel gang Los Carniceros head-on.
To date, all Kos’ features – The White House Effect (2024), Rebel Hearts (2021), Bending the Arc (2017) – have been documentaries, and while In Our Blood represents the exception, he nonetheless draws on his past experience to ground this genre outing in all manner of reality effects. For as Emily and Daniel record this excursion to Las Cruces as their own personal documentary, the film presents itself as ‘found footage’, pieced together entirely from what they have shot on their intradiegetic cameras. Meanwhile the homeless people (Jennifer Anderson, Charlene Garrick, Janielle Kaneakua, Antony McNeil, Aimee Martinez) that Emily interviews at a transitional living project about the violence that they have endured on the streets are in fact real residents of the actual Camp Hope essentially playing themselves.
Likewise Mallory Westfall’s screenplay, from a story she co-wrote with Steven Klein, Aaron Krogan and Clay Tweel, may gradually shift from initial naturalism to a place of recognisable horror mythology, but it nonetheless never stops intelligently allegorising the all-too-real wages and intergenerational ramifications of addiction, and the illegal enterprises that feed it. Here familial trauma runs deep, blood is, after all, thicker than water – and sometimes, the key to escaping the system that rules you is to cut off all ties.
strap: Pedro Kos’ genre-fied found-footage addiction allegory sees a young filmmaker on a frantic search for her estranged, missing mother
© Anton Bitel
