Without Blood

Despite sturdy performances, Without Blood doesn’t fully come together.

The sincerity of Without Blood can’t be denied, but alas, the road to mediocrity is paved with good intentions.

Despite bursts of intelligence, especially when it comes to conveying the fractured quality of trauma narratives, Without Blood’s vagueness ends up blunting many of its lessons.

The result is a melodrama where any sense of tension fades the longer Nina and Tito speak.

Jolie also lays it on thick stylistically, as if compensating for a hollowness at her lavish, sepia-toned film’s core.

For every moment where it seems like it’s getting somewhere more thoughtful, it will dance away into something else, lacking focus even as it remains faithful to the rather short source material.

By choosing to reside in abstraction, it imparts only generic and empty truths.