Shudder’s Original Bleed With Me Is A Stiff, Sluggish Descent Into A Bloodthirsty Madness

Shudder’s Original Bleed With Me is a Stiff, Sluggish Descent Into a Bloodthirsty Madness

The ever-growing gem of a streaming platform, Shudder, has brought us some great platform exclusive horror films, including the latest kidnapping thriller The Boy Behind The Door, which is well worth your look for for the nerve-wracking suspense.

Most of the time, anything called a “Shudder Original” is pretty solid. It pains me to say they have a rare flaw. Your new exclusive feature from writer/director Amelia Moses, Bleed with me, is a stiff and sluggish attempt at an atmospheric descent into bloodthirsty madness.

What starts out with a promising dark moodiness and a distinctive, secluded setting becomes a slogan through slow horror conventions, while mediocre actors behind sterile characters fail to add an odd life.

Moses broke out with the 2020 vampire horror Bloodthirsty and is still obviously bloodthirsty and returned with a quick follow-up that also features blood in the film and title.

It follows a shy and paranoid young woman on her remote, wooded cabin vacation, where she is out and about with an unpopular couple who don’t even seem to care about them. This is an ancient horror recipe for a hellish atmosphere, memorable strange moments, and a creepy climax. Bleed With Me could benefit from this.

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THE FILM

The film begins with the obligatory, beautiful shots of snowy hills and forests. Rowan (Lee Marshall) travels with colleague Emily (Lauren Beatty) and Emily’s boyfriend Brendan (Arias Tyros) on a trip to a cabin owned by Emily’s family. In the course of her travels, some facts become clear: Rowan is depressed and tense. Shy and uncomfortable all the time. She doesn’t talk much but hears her anxious thoughts aloud. It also becomes clear that she is in an unfortunate situation with Emily and Brendan, who are keen on each other and have the personalities of Mulch.

At first, Brendan rarely speaks to Rowan – a good work colleague of his girlfriend, whom they must have invited. It takes until everyone arrives in the cabin before Brendan actually asks: “How do you know each other again?”

Emily does not present herself to Rowan as a friend and often gets hot and heavy with her boyfriend in front of her. Brendan eventually warms up a bit with Rowan and begins to talk to her more, which Emily pays for with jealous looks.

At some point, Rowan cuts herself before Emily willingly suckles the blood from her thumb.

Chemistry

The chemistry between Rowan and the couple feels even less personal over time. She spends a lot of time alone in the attic looking at photos. Rowan’s fear escalates into daily and nightly nightmare visions. Soon their paranoid visions show in reality.

If you look at Bleed With Me you can feel what Moses was shooting at – a strange and profound, eerie slow burn that spreads into an unsettling feeling before total terror unfolds. Unfortunately, it lacks the eerie events, strange behaviors of fascinating characters, or the peculiar sensitivity to create the appearance of a surreal conglomeration before shocks finally creep in halfway through the film.

By this point, however, you’ve been watching for almost an hour a meek girl with no personality suffering from anxiety while hanging out in a hut with a couple of equally deserted fools. Efforts of slowly burning surreal nature require either character who is strange enough to make them feel feverish dreams or characters who are so personable that you will like them. These characters are lifeless.

Slow

Adams has ideas, one of which is a plot similar to that of the cult classic Let’s Scare Jessica To Death, but the formula of the “Is this paranoia or real” crawl is all too familiar; We know what to expect, and modern audiences need strong performance and a bit of weird excitement during this eerily slow build-up in tension.

What we have with Bleed With Me is a cast of amateurs too hollow to add a bizarre touch of life to this project. It doesn’t need lifelessness. Bleed With Me Very Well should have a failed pulse. The formula is fine and the attitude is excellent. Moses’ plot, while not overly inspired, is good enough to add new bizarre elements.

The cabin is lavish, but old and possibly haunted, in remote icy forests. Rowan is a pathetic leading actor who feels victimized in an unfortunate situation. A creepy build-up to haunting conclusions should go without saying, but the actors are dry youngsters who go through the movements of standard characters.

The characters themselves don’t do much. 20 minutes after the film finishes, I have a hard time remembering what they were getting into? They just have boring, boring small talk chats before breaking off into their own world. Unless sub-par performers can’t subtly scare us while they have little to do, we as an audience are forced to impatiently watch an old trick slowly unfold before us.

Even slower

Almost an hour later, Moses gives us the first unsettling horror when Rowan dreams of stepping into Emily and gnawing at a bloody human thigh bone in front of the fireplace. The scene is well framed, a crackling fire starts and Emily leans over creepily. When you arrive so late, however, it is usually an opportunity for the viewer to sigh and say “Finally!” to call. We needed blood or guts or something really weird and sinister after such a long, uneventful build. From then on it was what we wanted but exceeded exactly what we expected.

It all makes one question what the purpose is. We’ve seen slow-moving vampire films before. We have all caught a few “huts in the forest”, atmospheric places. Bleed With Me doesn’t take a new route, but it suffers more from lazily trudging along with a tried and tested route – one that could potentially provide fresh momentum if approached with an inspired flair. The actors in Bleed With Me don’t bring that flair to Moses.

As a filmmaker, Moses can clearly write and stage a creepy and beautiful setting and put a vulnerable character under bizarre, awkward circumstances, but this project needs more eccentric performances and a weird or hallucinatory touch. Although I got into the movie with hope and ended up recommending a new piece of horror, Bleed With Me is boring and not worth the effort.

Thanks for reading!

Originally posted on my blog. Check it out here: https://kryztoff.website/

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