Blood

At times, Blood, feels like a slightly-filled-out television police procedural with better cinematography, but the performances have an almost Shakespearean grandeur.

A smart, well-acted and well-directed picture that adds up to a little more than the sum of its parts.

It’s a crisp, cold little thriller with a real sense of the noose tightening around otherwise unremarkable lives.

Blood wants to be a Greek tragedy about family loyalties, guilt, and the fall of a dynasty, but the characters never manage to connect with one another, separated by gulfs of melodramatic angst and the plot demands of a boringly unspooled police procedural.

Originality may be out of Blood's jurisdiction, but it manages to plod on, dutifully walking a tired old beat.

Dark, airless and packed with psychological hurt that seems to spring from nowhere, this angry morality play, tucked inside a police procedural, suffers from a crippling lack of back story and characters whose relationships are fraught with unexplained complexity.

Themes of family ties, obsession, and morality, so dramatically realized in Conviction, are gracelessly and shapelessly strewn together here.