Film Review: Matthias Schoenaerts and Joel Kinnaman in ‘Brothers By Blood’ isn’t nearly as horny as it sounds

A note to everybody in the business of casting and making movies — hire Matthias Schoenaerts. His specific mixture of sweet, sad, and bulkily intimidating always brings a heap of bang for its buck, to my eye — I have yet to see a movie that wasn’t made a little to a lot better just by Matthias being in it. (Okay maybe A Little Chaos, but that was one hundred percent that terrible wig’s fault.) And so it goes for Brothers By Blood,(formerly titled The Sound of Philadelphia), director Jérémie Guez’s languorous dissection of crime-family dynamics, set to strike VOD and some theaters this week. (Watch the trailer here.) A textbook case in “Hire Matthias Schoenaerts” if ever there was.

Schoenaerts plays Peter, another one of the introspective boxer-types that he could play in his sleep at this point. But Matthias, bless his bulk, never sleeps, even when he’s called on again to be oh-so world-weary — he remains keenly watchable even at his most somnambulistic, monosyllabic; he resonates like a quiet little bull in the corner of the china-shop standing on its tippy-toes trying so hard to not smash the world. By now Matthias can virtuoso out the tension of that un-smashing — he’s forever the lean-back to a punch, one that doesn’t always come. One that might morph into a hug, a big bear one, given the correct alignment of hugging circumstances.

Peter specifically seems to just want to box and blend into the Philadelphia night shadows, but he’s unfortunately for him cousins with an erratic and mildly-deranged small-time crime-boss Michael (Joel Kinnaman, hobbling and viper-eyed), who exploits Peter’s meat-packing presence to his constant advantage. When the menu calls for intimidation, Michael calls up Peter to his side. Kinnaman, leaning on a cane, somehow inverts his own hulking presence, seeming more like a rat blown up to human-size; scraggly and feral under baggy person clothes. He limps in all the senses.

Continue over to MNPP for full review…

Brothers By Blood will be released in select theaters and on video-on-demand on January 22, 2021.

Image courtesy of Vertical Entertainment