USA
2024 89 mins
OV English
Subtitles : English
“She’s not a bad person. She just made a lot of bad choices. And hurt a lot of people.”
Filmmaker Emily Wyland (Brittany O’Grady, THE WHITE LOTUS, STAR) is making a documentary about reconnecting with her estranged mother, Sam (Alanna Ubach, EUPHORIA) after a long decade of distance. A distance that began at the age of 13, when authorities forcibly removed her from their home due to her mother’s struggles with addiction. Now, Sam has reached out. She’s clean. She terribly wants to be back in Emily’s life. With her cinematographer Danny (E. J. Bonilla, THE OLD MAN, THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER) by her side, Emily heads to her hometown of Las Cruces, New Mexico, braced for anything that might come with the reopening of old wounds. They meet at Sam’s home. She seems to be doing better. She has so much to share. The following day, she disappears without a trace, and Emily and Danny soon learn that Las Cruces has become a place where vulnerable people regularly go missing. They desperately try to piece together a mounting multitude of disturbing clues before it may be too late.
Leave it to an award-winning documentary filmmaker to do found-footage horror right. A perfectly calculated, slow-burn nightmare that opens with the feel of an indie doc and gradually evolves into something uniquely sinister, IN OUR BLOOD is the narrative feature debut of Oscar-nominated documentarian Pedro Kos (REBEL HEARTS, LEAD ME HOME). Employing the arsenal of techniques that he’s honed through documentary filmmaking, Kos has crafted a found-footage styled mystery horror that lands with chilling authenticity, further grounding the piece by casting a number of people from Las Cruces’ unhoused community who embed the film’s DNA with haunting layers of grief. With a tremendous performance from O’Grady at its centre, IN OUR BLOOD deftly uses themes of addiction and recovery, and the intersecting vulnerabilities that come with the isolation that addicts often experience, to build a profound horror narrative. Sad, scary, and unshakably convincing, it will linger like the ghosts of stolen futures. – Mitch Davis