Bloodline is a 2019 thriller about a new father stressed about a dark world, taking matters into his own hands.
High school is full of ups and downs, and for counselor Evan (Seann William Scott), he’s heard and seen it all, listening every day to students with a host of issues and problems, many sharing stories of terrible abuse at home. Evan’s a new father himself, he and his wife Lauren (Mariela Garriga) dealing with the challenges of a newborn and Evan’s mother Marie (Dale Dickey), who has come to help. So how to handle the stress? For Evan, that’s easy. Murder. Cold blooded knife to the throat murder, kidnapping and killing the abusers of his students, filling the local park up with buried corpses.
Let’s quickly get past the obvious dotted lines leading back to Dexter and move on to Scott, who steers hard left into territory he’s sort of been working his way toward since his breakout roles more than twenty years ago. He’s always had a kind of menace about him, which he’s taken advantage of in a few films before but firmly embraces here, director Henry Jacobson giving him plenty of room to explore the dark corners of a twisted character with a constricting sense of purpose.
It all begins with a nod to classic slasher films with a nude young woman in a shower savagely meeting the busy end of a large kitchen knife, leaving us wondering why she’s targeted and who’s behind it. It’s a gruesome start, setting the tone for a movie that features plenty of slice and dice along with an in-your-face close up of a live birth. Jacobson paints all this with a familiar style, part homage part carbon copy, but does so with such commitment, it mostly works, especially layered with its creative electronic score by Trevor Gureckis. It’s a small film, but packs a boatload of sharp imagery into it that feels much bigger.
We learn that Evan has a troubled past, giving some reason to his motivation, connecting his devotion to his mother and genuine thirst for revenge. Scott and Dickey are largely the best thing going in this, the pair fun to watch, since it’s not all that clouded about what Evan is up to. And that’s death, something we are witness to in troubling detail as Evan takes to giving his victims time to understand their fates. That makes for some disconcerting viewing of course as the blood flies, which is all doled out with a robust flair for the macabre. Meanwhile, we ever so slowly get into Evan’s head … and his mother’s.
This manages to be entertaining for most of the way, though isn’t all that sustainable, but few films like this are, relying on the flash of its stars and effects to push us through. Thankfully, Scott is up to the task and Jacobson wrings the premise for all its worth, his slow burn approach offering up some well-earned moments of suspense in a film that clings to several standards while properly doing what it intends.