It’s always a good sign when a film opens with a speech by Larry Fessenden, playing a videotaped cult leader. Blood Shine follows that with a feint as Keith (Brendan Sexton III), a down-on-his-luck farm worker, has a breakdown in the middle of nowhere and is taken in by Clara (Emily Bennett), an apparently frail and lonely woman living in a big old house … the set-up is pregnant with menace, as both characters size each other up and it’s a toss of the coin as to whether either or both will turn out to be homicidal maniacs, with an ellipse in story and a frenzied, bloody scene which segues into the end of a film-within-a-film and the intro to another protagonist, asshole filmmaker Brighton West – who is trying to work on a personal project though he’s contracted to deliver a sequel in his Craven franchise (it’s already been to space).
Bright demonstrates to the audience that he’s a self-pitying, manipulative whiner (he wants an actress he’s ‘auditioning’ to improvise ‘the seduction scene’ rather than the dialogue she’s prepped) and has not got his drug problems under control. Putting off his manager via a series of phone calls – in a parallel with FrightFest pick Blockhead – Brighton heads for a secluded spot – that Toby Poser is peering through his window is offputting – to work. He traipses deeper into the wilderness, muttering that it’s not fair ‘you have to be fucking British’ to make folk horror, then shows up at Clara’s house. It’s a moot point as to whether what happens to him will inspire him to be more creative, allow him to be reborn after much Martyrs-like suffering as some sort of god, or just render him incapable of ever doing anything again.
Written and directed by Bennett and Justin Brooks, this starts quiet-creepy then gets more intense, with some chained-in-an-attic abuse material harking back to the agonising films of twenty or so years ago – is anyone nostalgic for the torture porn boom? – while other, more interesting themes bubble under. The three leads are excellent, with Bennett giving herself a plum role as a supremely odd woman.