Bloody Marie is a 2019 drama about an artist living in amsterdam, who, after a sobering event, is forced to take action.
Marie Wankelmut (Susanne Wolff) has hit rock bottom. Or so it seems. Once a prominent graphic artist enjoying a carefree hedonistic lifestyle in Amsterdam’s red light district, things have taken a turn. Her mother has recently passed, she’s out of money, hopelessly drunk, and worse, creatively uninspired, wallowing in the escape booze offers while caught in a string of conflicts in bars and liquor shops. Her publisher is worried. As her descent continues, the alcohol consumes her and soon the only way to survive is to steal money from a neighbor, but this only further collapses the thin walls concealing the only hiding place she knows and now she faces a real threat.
We’ve been here before of course, given access to a shattered human being in a disintegrating state of chaos, but that does not lessen the impact of co-writers and co-directors Lennert Hillege and Guido van Driel‘s charged character study of Marie, a caustic, chilling portrait of a woman in dramatic emotional peril. As with any in this genre, it takes a strong physical presence from its lead to make it work and fortunately, that’s well taken care of in Wolff’s steadily erosive performance. Marie is a woman with a potent taste of artistic success, who hasn’t been able to get it back, the loss of her mother – a drunk herself – leaving her in a state of incompleteness, lost in memories (presented as flashbacks) of their shared descent.
Despite the potential, Bloody Marie is not an overly-melodramatic effort, one devoted to focusing on the increasingly harrowing decline of its lead, but rather a kind of mystery where we follow Marie in a widening paranoid labyrinth of fear and doubt. She has stolen a good deal of money from next door, which becomes the fulcrum of the story eventually leaving her in a constant state of imbalance as these people’s lives, often heard only through the wall dividing them become the center of her spin. Marie is soon thrust right into a gruesome bit of trouble that her actions alone have caused, and now she’s in fight for her life. In more ways than one.
All this cleanly puts Bloody Marie on a different track from the usual ‘declining alcoholic’ fare, the second half in particular taking us into a whole new area of madness that sees Marie pulled into a nightmare of color and fury where her life falls into great personal danger. The filmmakers manage to do this with bouts of intense dialogue, the mix of Dutch and English giving Marie’s deeply purposeful encounters weight in developing both her state in all this and the plausible entanglements that follow. It’s not a big production, the movie very contained, avoiding the walking tour temptation the Amsterdam location seems to offer, instead keeping the famous setting in the dark peripheral as Marie combs the alleys and rooftops, the few people she meets all bearing some significance in her fate.
The thing to do while watching Bloody Marie is to pay attention the subtleties, the small moments in-between the larger ones that come to define Marie and her crippling state; the way she closes a closet door, the intimacy of a glance at a floor we know means something because of what we’ve already seen, the sounds in her head in the opening moments. There are many others and all invite us more deeply into Marie’s haunting little world and it’s things like this, that attention to detail that really make the difference for me. I’m a sucker for filmmakers who push us to notice the smaller challenges. Hillege and Van Driel pace this methodically but with poignancy, at times having you feel witness to a darkening personal fantasy, one that may not feel identifiable for most but nonetheless is affecting. Highly recommended.