‘Without Blood’ Review: Angelina Jolie Directs Salma Hayek and Demián Bichir With Lots of Looks But Little Content | TIFF

Writer/director Angelina Jolie has shown a penchant for challenging films depicting war when she is behind the camera—think First They Killed My Father or Unbroken. For her latest directorial feature, Without Blood, which just had its world premiere at the 49th Toronto International Film Festival, she tackles the subject from a different vantage point, that of the lasting scars that war inflicts on those who experience it. And while the film is beautifully shot, as well as expertly acted by veteran actors Salma Hayek and Demián Bichir, the source material is unoriginal and even contrived in making its point. Jolie’s script unfortunately cannot quite escape its shackles.

The story is set in an unnamed country in an unnamed time at the end of an unspecified war that is coming to a close. The original, a book by Alessandro Baricco, is purposefully vague as to these details, setting out to speak metaphorically and to teach broadly about the horrors of war. In the movie though, this instantly becomes problematic. While this level of abstraction may have served the novel’s poetic purposes, it is an imperfect fit on the screen, where audiences need to ground their outrage about atrocities on a conflict they are familiar with hating, or at least on one that can be explained to them with a handful of title cards.

In any event, in this indeterminate point in space and time, there are still accounts to be settled as the war comes to an end. Three bandits—one of them Tito, then a young boy of only 17—approach a secluded manor, intent on exacting brutal revenge on the doctor who lives there. He, apparently on the losing side, is accused of committing atrocities in a clinic he operated during the conflict. He also appears as a devoted, loving father to a teenage son and to his little daughter Nina. Whether he truly was a tyrant or not we are not told because, again, the point is in the abstraction, not the minutiae of any detail. Who is good and who is evil is precisely not the point.

So the bandits break in, announcing their intention. Meanwhile, the good doctor has hidden Nina under the floorboards, that familiar hiding place for children who experience violent trauma in movies only to grow up as vengeful murderers. Bullets fly after a series of terse exchanges and plenty of flashbacks, and warm red blood oozes through the wooden crevices and onto the child’s tender feet. She watches, laying sideways, listening to the hoof of the footsteps above, and wondering if she is fated to live.

Many decades pass. We see Hayek, a determined mature woman clutching a small black handbag, wearing a white stylish overcoat, and allowing a single streak of white hair to hug her slightly wrinkled eyes. She is very obviously Nina. Her footsteps clobber on the marble of a (yes, unnamed) majestic capital city, in the veranda of a grandiose building. She approaches a little lottery stand, where a quiet man played by Bichir (Best Actor Oscar nominee for A Better Life) sits patiently. As Nina later describes him, he seems like a normal man, with a worn-out coat who, when he removes his glasses, folds them carefully in their creases and who stands carefully and with purpose. He is very obviously Tito.

And after she buys a lottery ticket, he reveals he knows who she is, and that he knows why she is there.

The two agree to have a drink, and the rest of Without Blood’s crisp 90 minutes runtime takes place as a weighty chamber piece where Nina and Tito exchange stories about how that fateful encounter when they were children continues to haunt them. Nina tells Tito about what happened to her after she escaped, including the various horrors that occurred to the orphaned young girl. Tito recounts the death of his two accomplices, and the fear he has had for all his life, that Nina would come back to exact revenge. He preaches about the utilitarianism of war, of the end justifies the means philosophy that drives men to kill. She scoffs at the mentality, noting that war has brought nothing good to anyone. Both complain that the world around them has moved on from the war. It is also clear the war has not moved on from either of them.

There are plenty of reasons to watch Without Blood, principal among them the expert performances by Hayek and Bichir, two of Mexico’s most experienced and renowned actors. This is their third film collaboration together, but the duo goes back several decades (like their characters do). Their comfortable familiarity interweaves well with their obvious disdain and suspicion. The single part of the movie’s plot that works is how it keeps you guessing as to what exactly their intentions are. When Nina pulls a little mirror out of her purse, we see her hidden pistol. But the way they stare into each other’s eyes longingly makes you wonder. Are they going to kill or kiss each other?

The other obvious reason is that Jolie is such a thoughtful, careful director. Seamus McGarvey’s cinematography is moody and intimate. Though most of the action takes place in that quiet restaurant intimate setting, the flickering light of the table’s candlelight highlights the creases of war and battle in the characters’ eyes. The handful of outside scenes in the present place characters as shadows, only pieces of their former selves. Jolie’s aesthetic is pitch perfect—she knows how good looking her aging actors are and she focuses her camera intently on them. Her interest in the source material and the message it sends is sincere.

And it is a good thing that Jolie is behind the camera and Hayek and Bichir in front of it. In anyone else’s hands, the novel’s oblique messaging, the story that feels as if cobbled from a variety of sources, as if plucked from various high fruit trees, would have entirely disintegrated. The characters seem to be wanting to teach you something, but they never manage to do so. Whatever message they have—that war is bad, destructive, and everlasting—is not a message that really needs teaching.  

At some point in their exchange Nina explains to Tito that some stories are meant to have a moral. “That’s why they exist,” she says. “To say something profound.  Other stories are maybe just stories.”  While one suspects that Angelina set out to make the former kind of film, she most decidedly made the latter.

Grade: B-

This review is from the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival World Premiere. There is no U.S. distribution at this time.