Bloom world première at FrightFest, 31st August 2026
Bloom opens impressionistically. There is a soft-focus close-up of a nose sniffing deeply at the stamens of a distinctive red flower. A man with blood-stained forearms pushes a wheelbarrow towards a woman kneeled before a bed of those flowers who is herself covered in blood, and she is still sniffing at one of those flowers as the man puts his hand on her shoulder. This is a flashback to decades before the film’s principal narrative, but rather importantly, the sequence will later be reprised, with minor variations, in the present day. Here patterns, behaviours and compulsions repeat themselves, echoing through time as part of a family inheritance, for early and late bloomers alike.
Lily (Meghan Carrasquillo) is about to be hit with an unexpected legacy. When Lily was just nine years old, her mother succumbed to her long-term drug addiction and died. Now as an adult, Lily cleans other people’s AirBnB properties to make the guests’ stays spotless, even as Lily herself is living hand to mouth and cannot afford her own home. Yet all that changes when she receives the surprising news that her long-estranged aunt Rose (Cara Leoni) has recently died, leaving Lily as sole heir to her plant nursery business in Arizona. There, with help from Rose’s old partner Ray (Robert Craighead), Lily learns the ropes and, once she starts settling into this new lifestyle, even gives employment and a bed to local sweetheart Evan (Jadon Cal Fitzpatrick).
Yet it is when Lily accidentally cuts herself on the shattered glass of an old framed picture of Rose that she makes a discovery that will change her fortunes forever. For from those drops of blood, strange red flowers bloom with miraculous speed – flowers whose fragrance she cannot stop inhaling, and which, redubbed ‘scarlet widows’, prove to sell like hotcakes at the local produce market no matter what the price. Yet as these peculiar plants spring from the earth, a new Lily also emerges, getting high on her own supply while increasingly willing to do anything to keep up with her customers’ – and her own – growing demand. This requires ever more blood, and Lily is no longer fussy about its source, while irrationally angry at anyone, even those previously dear to her, who get in her way.
Stefan Colson’s feature, which he has co-written with Jack Campbell, takes a bit of Little Shop of Horrors (1960,1986), a bit of Blood Car (2007) and a bit of Bliss (2019). Yet Bloom for the most part maintains a serious register, as it shows the generational curse of addiction, and the death-spiral logic of supply and demand, while giving the vampire mythos an unusual botanical spin. It also falls into that relatively rare genre category, daylight horror, and is shot by cinematographer Sam Wilkerson with a sun-dappled aesthetic to offset all the bloody mayhem. As Lily herself puts it, “We’re turning tragedy into beauty” – even if her opioid crop also brings out people’s ugliness.
strap: Stefan Colson’s day-lit botanical horror exposes the new owner of a rural nursery to the addiction in her blood.
© Anton Bitel
