Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Amelia Moses
Starring: Lee Marshall, Lauren Beatty, Aris Tyros
Relationships sure can be draining. They can drain your time, your energy,
even your finances. In writer/director Amelia Moses' feature debut Bleed
with Me, a young woman begins to suspect that her best friend is draining
her very lifeforce. I mean that literally. She thinks her BFF is stealing her
blood.
Rowan's (Lee Marshall) first mistake is to agree to accompany her best
buddy Emily (Lauren Beatty) and her boyfriend Brendan (Aris Tyros) on a
weekend getaway to her family's remote cabin. Come on Rowan, haven't you
ever seen a horror movie? It's a literal cabin in the friggin' woods!
To be fair to Rowan, Emily and Brendan seem like an innocent enough pair,
what your mother might describe as "a couple of nice kids." And Emily seems
to be Rowan's only friend in the world, having buddied up with her in their
workplace when seemingly nobody else would.
If anything, Rowan is the oddest member of this trio. She seems one
hangnail away from a full blown mental breakdown, a bag of nerves bursting
at the seams. Scars on her wrist hint at a troubled past. If this were 1976
she might be played by Geraldine Chaplin, whose anxious energy Marshall
seems to echo. Emily and Brendan seem annoyingly stable, the sort of rich
kids that populated the early films of Whit Stillman. But there's a WASPy
creepiness to Emily, which comes to the fore when Rowan cuts herself and
Emily immediately pounces to suck the blood from her finger. "There," she
soothes her friend. "All better." Yikes.
Maybe Emily was just being helpful to a friend in need, but that night
Rowan experiences a strange hallucination in which her cabin-mates seem to
be tampering with her while she's in a semi-conscious state. The following
morning Rowan realises she's bleeding from one of her wrist wounds. Has
Emily opened it up during the night to feast on her blood?
Bleed with Me plays as a curiously novel domestic abuse allegory. It's not
some burly man physically beating Rowan, but rather her female best friend
who seems to be gaslighting her. Rowan has a couple of opportunities to flee
the cabin, yet hesitates each time. Like a beaten spouse, she seems to weigh
up her options and is left wanting. If she runs out on her one friend, will
she be left alone? Maybe it's all in her head? Maybe she's brought it on
herself?
Moses has found two impressive leads in Marshall and Beatty. Both actresses
have a strangely unsettling manner about them, and watching them perform Rowan
and Emily's politely passive aggressive cat and mouse game does enough to
paper over some of the film's cracks.
Like its protagonists, Moses' film is
stiflingly obtuse in its true intentions, to a degree that ultimately
becomes frustrating. Even as a self-confessed fan of ambiguity, I felt a
little cheated by the climax, which leaves us scratching our heads as to
just what sort of story we've been spun. In parts Bleed with Me relies a
little too heavily on Single White Female-esque tropes, but there's an
interesting movie buried amid the genre conventions here. I look forward to
seeing if Moses can bring her voice to the fore in future works.
