Blood Immortal – review

Director: Robert Joseph Butler

Release date: 2019

Contains spoilers

Also known as Love Immortal, this is a strange film as I’ll explain, nonetheless it is well done aside from the strange aspect. It follows three time periods in three chapters, the first 1789, the second roughly contemporary and the third in the near future and the entire thing was a brave enterprise that, for the most part, the filmmakers pull off.

Whether the filmmakers meant to, or not, the chaptered approach moving from the past to the future reminded me of the Gilda Stories as I watched, but with the racial aspect removed. Rather, this film concerns itself with humanity's self-destructive economic policies – and the environmental impact thereof.

Richard Tyson as Duncan

That thread is perhaps not as obvious in the first chapter. But before we get there we have an opening scene of a man, Bernard Duncan (Richard Tyson), looking out over a lake near to his horse and black-draped trap. Moving from this scene, night has fallen and we see Mary (Kayla Kelly) stood by a horse, whose nose is bloodied. Duncan’s trap happens along and he stops, walking up to her as she asks for assistance. He bites her.

Julie Kline as Eliza

Chapter 1 starts with Eliza (Julie Kline) walking to find her mother, Josephine (Aphrodite Nikolovski), who has visited her husband’s grave – it is a year since he died and the gravestone shows that he was a veteran of the War of Independence. As they walk back to their cabin, the land it sits on theirs by dint of the Land Vouchers her husband was given due to his service, Josephine staggers and drops to her knees, coughing up blood. What we then get is an evening scene with some dialogue based around belief before there is the sound of a carriage.

feeding with his blood

It is Duncan and, apologising for the lateness of his visit, he explains he is from the treasury department. Inside he explains about the set up of states and counties and makes an offer to buy the land from Josephine. There is some back and forth and it ends up with him leaving coins as a down payment while she thinks about it. The next night he returns – Eliza is out and he tells Josephine that he could sense she was dying and that he can make her live forever. He bites her and feeds his blood.

Aphrodite Nikolovski as Josephine

When she comes round he gives her, what might be described as, the new vampire talk. But she did not want this and his suggestion of starting an immortal family doesn’t find favour. They fight, with him throttling her, and she stabbing him with a potato peeler. Eliza walks in on this scene and stabs at him with a poker, conveniently (accidentally) staking him as she does so. The women are left alone and we leave the chapter with Eliza offering her mother her wrist.

Fiona and victim

And here we get the strangeness I mentioned. The chapter was excellently located, with good costuming and equally good performances. The dialogue worked, building characters through the discussions and minutia they discuss. Yet there is no real denouement. At this point it doesn’t seem too important, after all there are further chapters to go but remember this is not a prologue, it is a chapter. As we go in to chapter 2 and meet vampire Fiona (Jordan Trovillion, A Mosquito-Man) we actually lose sight of mother and daughter for an entire chapter.

drinking clean blood

Fiona preys on women but it is becoming an issue as she has developed sensitivities to blood. This is down to the pollutants that humans are carrying in blood – a concept that was famously explored previously in Only Lovers Left Alive. These sensitivities lead to stomach cramps, vomiting and general malaise. Her vampire friend, Victoria (Chevonne Wilson), recommends an illicit source of tested ‘good’ blood.

Fiona and Patricia

Meanwhile Victoria is taking night economics classes, which leads to us witnessing debates around economic theory. She makes friends with the class Professor, Patricia (Erika Hoveland). Again the dialogue is excellent, the performances work and they with the dialogue build us, in Fiona and Patricia, a pair of three-dimensional characters. The issue, again, is a lack of denouement – the section gives as an insight into the physical decline of the vampires due to the environmental and social decline and the economic decline of the States but there feels like there should be more of a personal point drawn as we move into the third chapter (via a brief vignette introducing one of the new characters).

Josephine drinks

The third chapter is in a future where the economy is less in downfall than it is in absolute plummet towards collapse with desperate Government actions trying to fend off the inevitable. We are again with Josephine and Eliza – Eliza now sensitive to tainted blood and Josephine trying to save her daughter with clean blood (there is a simile with the Government economic actions here). There is a story around the black market and there is a cyclic element with Josephine using Duncan’s coins from the first story (such a coin also appears in the second story). Again the acting is grand and, whilst there are conclusions to aspects of story, there is no overall satisfying denouement.

a world gone mad

Perhaps there doesn’t need to be, but I really felt there needed to be something that just wasn’t there. Not that this is bad because of it, on the contrary, however when you get an indie film that does so well with dialogue, costuming, locations and filming in general then it seems a shame for an element to be missing. The vampires, in some ways, represent the economic decline with their health failing too – however they have been through this before (Fiona mentions the Great Depression at one point). The only real lore we get is the blood sensitivity and an insinuation that they have to avoid sunlight (the drapes on the carriage, the night visitation, Victoria having paper on her windows, Fiona in night class).

I enjoyed this, but that missing denouement really sticks out to me. Perhaps I’m being too harsh, perhaps the filmmakers believed they had one and I missed it. As stands, however, it still deserves a strong 6 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US