TIFF 2024: Angelina Jolie’s Earnest Drama ‘Without Blood’ is Respectable but Flat

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | September 11, 2024 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | September 11, 2024 |

Angelina Jolie is having one hell of a year. She won her first Tony Award for producing the Best Musical winner The Outsiders, her clothing company Atelier Jolie is being celebrated for its commitment to renewable fashion. She’s leading the Best Actress Oscar conversation with the biopic Maria, where she plays the grand opera diva Maria Callas. Now, she’s also back as a director with Without Blood, her first work behind the camera since 2017’s First They Killed My Father.

They say that war never truly ends. For Nina (Salma Hayek Pinault), it has defined every moment of her life. As a child, she hid in the floorboards of her family home as gunmen broke into her home to exact revenge on her father. As an adult, she meets Tito (Demian Bichir), a lowly lottery seller in what seems to be a random conversation. But he knows who she truly is and why she is here: he’s the last remaining survivor of the men who killed her family. And he knows what she wants with him.

Jolie’s work as a director is largely defined by her humanitarian concerns, which makes her unique among her contemporaries. In the Land of Blood and Honey depicted a romance tormented by the carnage of the Bosnian war. Unbroken was a biopic about a runner who spent years surviving torture in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. First They Killed My Father, her best work, depicted the genocidal campaign of the Khmer Rouge from the perspective of a child. She is journalistically minded in her choices, which is admirable but often hinders her screenplays, leaving them didactic when they call out for the poetic. It’s a fate that befalls Without Blood, a beautifully made and impeccably acted drama with a hazy eye for tricky details.

Jolie told Variety that she is drawn to movies about war because of the extremes of the human condition they reveal. She is certainly well versed on the issue thanks to decades of work as a humanitarian and UN Ambassador. So, it’s a shame that Without Blood plays it so vaguely. This isn’t based on a real war or historical event. The overall mood is more one of a parable than documentary. When it comes to the scars they leave behind, every war is the same, and so are the stories of the pain left behind. It’s true, to some extent, but in practice it sounds like platitudes.

Bichir and Hayek Pinault spend most of their running time sitting opposite one another in a cafe having this extended conversation about retribution and trauma. She tells her story with a nostalgic flush that suggests she has dealt with her pain. He offers his perspective, wherein her struggles only got worse after her father’s death. She was but a pawn in a game of men and their guns, a reminder that the biggest casualties of war tend to be children. Tito’s cause was one of justice, at least in his eyes. When you believe in a cause so fervently, the collateral damage is worth it. That’s the promise, anyway. But trauma warps the memory and nobody is entirely reliable in their recollections (a detail I wish Jolie did more with.)

You can’t be mad at any film that gives these two actors, so frequently underused by American cinema, the space to do their thing with no interruptions. Bichir and Hayek Pinault have great chemistry, a kind of banter that is steeped in tension but hints at what could have been in a different world. Hayek Pinault is mannered, tightly controlled even as she shares her trauma. She can command Tito to listen to her, to follow her to his fate, but the hints of the broken child are evident in her minute emotional slips. It makes you wish they could have been given more than the limited and obvious to say.

While the script is lacking, Jolie’s direction is strong. She’s a craftsperson and manages to avoid making the central set-up too stagey. The opening, wherein the killers take down Nina’s house amid gunfire and confessions, demonstrates a kind of flair that would make Jolie a fun director of action movies. Everyone has trauma of some kind, shown in short sharp bursts, like one killer opening the door to Nina’s house and being barraged with the memories of his brutalized family. Jolie has always been savvy in choosing her collaborators, and here she has Seamus McGarvey on lush cinematography duties while Rutger Hoedemaekers provides an evocative score.

I maintain that one day Jolie will direct a truly brilliant film. She has all the tools for it as well as a strong vision for the stories she wants to tell and why. Without Blood fits right into her short filmography as a continuation of her themes and shows her growth behind the camera, but the script needed to be braver, more specific. As it is, this is a film to respect more than love.

Without Blood had its world premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking distribution.