Bloody Marie

A cautionary tale, a story of salvation, sad, lyrical, funny and even brutal at times, Bloody Marie is a shot of adrenaline in a landscape filled with cinematic clones. It may not be perfect, or for everyone, but it sure is spicy as hell, and it gets most of the ingredients just right.

The chaotic violence, when co-writers/director Guido van Driel and Lennert Hillege dish it out, is frenetic — a drunk’s weaving and teetering hand-held camer chase, sudden turns towards the brutal, an assault that seems to come out of nowhere — to a drunk.

Even at its most pulse-pounding, Bloody Marie remains locked on its sympathetically pathetic protagonist.

Susanne Wolff, who impressed critics last year in Wolfgang Fischer's "Styx," makes another strong turn here, grounding what could have become a merely lurid tale of dissipation, danger and sex work.

Given their evident talent for packaging (as opposed to content), Hillege and van Driel might next consider doing something of a more purely genre-based nature, where depth or its lack thereof won’t matter much.