Film Review — "Bloodthirsty"

Amelia Moses debuted two films in 2020, making her a bona fide badass. Her Bleed With Me—a cabin in the woods tale with a vampirism angle—premiered first at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival last summer. As of this writing, I have not seen Bleed With Me, but I am definitely going to soon. Because Bloodthirsty has piqued my curiosity. Just a few months after the Canadian festival screened her freshman feature, horror fans got a taste of Bloodthirsty via Austin’s Fantastic Fest last October. With this sophomore film, Moses uses lycanthropy as her vehicle—although the werewolf stuff is mostly incidental. Moses uses familiar genre conventions merely as a launch pad for this story about unlocking one’s inner beast and combating the predators among us.

I’ve never worked in the music industry, but I have worked in the film industry. So I can assure you, monsters exist. I walked away from #setlife a few years ago for a slew of reasons, one of the main ones being the horrible people who somehow manage to ascend to positions of power. For more than half a decade, I put up with… a lot. Let’s just leave it at that. Thankfully, I never answered to anyone who’d been accused and acquitted of murder, but I’ve known a few Production Designers and Assistant Directors who I’m sure are capable of it.

In Bloodthirsty, Greg Bryk plays such a character. Vaughn is a former boy band idol turned infamous music producer who demands an almost impossibly high level of mental commitment from the artists he collaborates with and sculpts. His latest protégée is Grey, played by Lauren Beatty. Grey is an indie singer-songwriter struggling to craft the follow-up to her well-received debut album. She’s facing tons of pressure to deliver and is willing to do whatever needs to be done to get to the top of the charts, to the chagrin of her girlfriend. Katharine King So plays Charlie, the thankless concerned significant other role. And genre film legend Michael Ironside is also present.

I mean, this gig has be the easiest money of Ironside’s career, right? As Grey’s psychiatrist, he has two brief scenes that demand very little of him as a performer and were absolutely filmed in a single afternoon. Dr. Swan has been trying to assuage Grey’s horrific nightmares through talk therapy and medication. In her life, his patient is a passive vegan, but in her gruesome night terrors Grey feasts on the flesh and blood of slaughtered prey. Moses opens Bloodthirsty showing the various sides of Grey in three distint lights. In the first five minutes, we get her devouring a victim by the light of the moon, we get a downtrodden Grey matching the drab office of Dr. Swan, and we get a very primped Grey at the center of a high-end photoshoot establishing that she does indeed possess a particular pop culture status of the moment. So of course the pressure is mounting for her.

Then the shadowy Vaughn swoops in to take Grey under his wing. It doesn’t matter to her that he may have the blood of his dead fiancée on his hands. This isn’t all that surprising, really. Like… how many artists in today’s music industry continue to work with Dr. Luke, knowing what they know? Or Phil Spector in decades past? Or Woody Allen and Roman Polanski in the present day film industry? Big name actors are still attaching themseves to those projects for the clout and the opportunity, despite the sinister histories of those directors. But what makes Vaughn’s case noteworthy is the fact that he was tried and found not guilty—which doesn’t always mean innocent.

As a performer, one of Greg Bryk’s chief tasks is keeping Vaughn unreadable. Did he kill her? Is he just a brooding maverick? Is there something much more paranormal going on beneath the floorboards? A little bit of all of the above maybe? Playing a character who’s not meant to be easily decipherable can be tricky. Some actors in such situations have a tendency to play into the vagueness too heavily, which can render the performance hazy and bland as opposed to mysterious and interesting. And Bryk does an admirable job in that regard by remaining specific even when the writing is intentionally unclear. A certain 2000s Josh Stewart by way of 1990s Robert Carlyle quality lends him the natural murkiness he needs. His Vaughn is continually beguiling.

Likewise, Lauren Beatty’s Grey is persistantly engrossing. I’m a bit of a sucker for a character arc via a character’s art, though. In the beginning, Grey is in an all-too-familiar state of stagnation. The juices aren’t flowing right and she’s understandably frustrated—and her ghastly visions of feasting on the dead aren’t helping, either. But once Vaughn becomes her mentor, the creativity within her awakens, among other things. Her music gets incrementally better from scene to scene as the notes and vocals grow sonically more vibrant, but at a cost. Beatty organically complements the unlocking of Grey’s talent with the ascension of this strange creature inside her. With every new lyric, Grey edges ever closer to transforming into a vicious, unrecognizable beast.

Oftentimes, in order for us to succeed in a creative field that actually pays, it feels like we have to sacrifice our own humanity and wellness to make it work. Some peers will even tell you so. And, over time, you’ll find that they’re not entirely wrong. That’s partly why I quit filmmaking. An exoskeleton and a whole utility belt of defenses become necessary for survival. Gnashy teeth. Cutlass-like talons. Impenetrable skin. The only sure-fire way to defeat a predator is to basically turn into one. Not everybody is born to be a bloodthirsty carnivore, but the most determined will usually (d)evolve into one when pressed, as Grey does, and as I did for a while. The trick is to not let it consume you and twist you into an irredeemable wretch, as may have happened with Vaughn. Amelia Moses really got me thinking and feeling and reliving all kinds of stuff with Bloodthirsty, so I’m very much looking forward to checking out Bleed With Me. Both films are currently streaming on Shudder.