There is a sort of integrity in making a film as doggedly mediocre as Without Blood. Adapted from Alessandro Baricco’s 2002 novel, Senza Sangue, by movie star-cum-UN Goodwill Ambassador-cum-filmmaker Angelina Jolie (Unbroken), the film approaches vengeance long in the offing through the prism of ideological-driven violence and forgiveness, treating the latter as something genuinely worth embracing even while never letting go of the harm visited upon a person. It has the shape of one of Tarantino’s thrillers where twisted, wronged women methodically track down those who hurt her, with Salma Hayek Pinault sliding into the role of avenging angel. But rather than give into bloodlust, Jolie’s film denies catharsis at every turn. Instead, Without Blood is about confronting a monster and seeing them as a man and having the strength to say “I forgive you.” The film’s intentions are noble, but as dramaturgy it’s rudimentary and stultifying, with its twists and turns flattened out into something emotionally pat and hand-holdy. (That possibly explains why it’s taken over two years for the film to be released in the United States after premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival back in 2024.) Without Blood reaffirms that any correlation between good intentions and good filmmaking is entirely coincidental.
The film opens with a 20-minute-long prologue depicting an armed siege at a hacienda at some point early in the 20th century (the film is maddeningly vague about precisely when or even where its story is set, but best guess based on the production design and the actors is the late 1910s in, possibly, Mexico). The good doctor Manuel Rocha (Alfredo Herrera) has fortified himself in his home while trying to protect his adolescent son and young daughter, Nina (Karolay Fernandez), from three men with designs on killing them. Amongst these would-be assassins is 17-year-old Tito (Ariel Pérez-Lima), who is practically a child soldier in a revolution under the sway of his magnetic boss, Salinas (Juan Minujín). Salinas blames Manuel Rocha for the death of his brother, a prisoner in an unspecified civil war under the care of the doctor, and, after a tense stand-off that ends with Manuel Rocha and his son murdered, Salinas orders his men to search the house for Nina so as not to leave any potential witnesses. And it’s young Tito who finds Nina hidden away in a trapdoor under the floorboards, where he leaves her, unmolested and unknown to his compatriots, but not before Salinas orders the entire house be set ablaze with Nina still inside and left for dead.
Many decades later — a conflict that appears to be the Vietnam War plays on televisions to help establish the era — a stylish and mysterious woman (Hayek Pinault) strolls through a marketplace where she stops to engage with an unassuming kiosk vendor (Demián Bichir). After briefly chatting together, the woman invites the demure clerk to join her for a drink, which he reluctantly agrees to after some prodding. He takes her to a nearby restaurant where they sit across from one another, portent hanging heavy in the air. The viewer can readily assume who these two people are based on the age of actors and the preceding scenes, and it’s to the film’s small credit that it dispenses with any protracted misdirection by having Bichir immediately identify Hayek Pinault as the little girl he allowed to live 50 years earlier. Having worked out who this woman is and presumably why she has sought him out, the now adult Tito assumes the posture of a condemned man: proud yet resigned to his fate. Yet the conversation remains civil in spite of the surreptitious glances at the pistol in Nina’s handbag as she fills in the gaps of her life story for both Tito and the audience. Nina tells of being gambled away in a card game by her foster father to a count who fell madly in love with her and started a family with her (the character “reassures” the viewer that he gallantly waited until she was 14 before taking her as a child bride); how she was institutionalized by the count’s jealous family, which took her away from her three adult sons; how she hunted down and murdered one of her father’s killers; and, finally, her years-in-the-making plan to be sitting here across from Tito.
“Tells” really is the operative word here. Ostensibly a two-hander predominantly set in a dimly-lit cafe, Without Blood breaks up the conversation between Hayek Pinault and Bichir, which stretches on long enough to cover drinks through dessert and makes up the majority of the film’s 84-minute runtime, with narrated flashbacks that are less scenes than trailers for the characters’ backstories. Although we observe dozens of different actors over the film’s brief runtime, few of them actually speak, instead serving almost as mannequins in period dress; artfully posed for Jolie’s tableaux of anguish as they pantomime the events of the film’s omnipresent narration. It’s a hermetic approach to storytelling that tends to reduce its players to mere extras in the lives of Nina and Tito, while presenting Hayek Pinault and Bichir as rapt audiences who take turns patiently waiting one another to finish their respective legs of the plot so that other one can pick up the baton. There’s little give and take or dramatic fireworks in spite of the fraught subject matter; each is allowed time so speak their piece in a format which plays less like a conversation between adults who have lived rich and complicated lives than mere dueling monologues in service of an overarching theme.
Jolie’s body of work as a filmmaker has largely been preoccupied with chronicling global conflict with an emphasis on the suffering of civilian noncombatants — her feature debut, In the Land of Blood and Honey, was about the Bosnian War, while First They Killed My Father explores the legacy of the Khmer Rouge — and Without Blood slots nicely alongside her larger interests, which are as righteous as they are uncommercial. In refusing to tie its events to a specific historical conflict, Without Blood is attempting to speak to a larger cultural phenomenon: radicalization and the justification for violence as a means to political ends. Although now a kindly middle-aged man, Tito expresses no regret for his actions long ago, arguing that every death at his hands was in service of “the cause.” Nina in turn dispels that rationale by asking where has that cause gotten him or the world at large. One needn’t strain especially hard to search for present-day applications for the parable at the center of the film, although it’s something of a cop-out to elide the root causes or motivations of any specific conflict, settling for a blandly academic scenario where, in a vacuum, of course there’s never an actual justification for killing the child of your enemy. It’s all rather principled in its crunchy liberalism, but it veers uncomfortably close to sermonizing. Without Blood is urging us to turn the other cheek and let go of the rage that eats you up from the inside, but the manner in which it does so amounts to didacticism and searing stares shrink-wrapped in tears. The self-seriousness of the film’s subject matter overwhelms its dramatic qualities, while the film’s unwavering sense of morality and unwillingness to complicate the premise by muddying the waters pushes Without Blood into the realm of the bromide. If something is so obvious that it goes without saying, then why bother making a film about it?
DIRECTOR: Angelina Jolie; CAST: Salma Hayek Pinault, Juan Minujín, Demián Bichir, Nika Perrone; DISTRIBUTOR: Brainstorm Media; IN THEATERS: September 18; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 31 min.
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