The Spanish-language drama Dark Blood is the brutal, unrelentingly bleak, story of a man who goes to prison after getting revenge for the death of his son. It begins with a man covered in blood and quickly moves on to beatings and degradation. It spares the viewer only slightly more than it spares its protagonist. This is difficult to watch, but generally well-made, with good performances and a filmmaking style that sees without forcing a message. I admired it a lot more than I liked it. In the end, what bothered me about it wasn’t so much the cruelty; it was that I am not really sure what the point of it all was.
As the movie begins, Misael is brought to prison to await sentencing for murder. He immediately gets on the wrong side of an opportunistic, and uncaring, guard and then needs to figure out how the ecosystem works in an effort to communicate with his wife on the outside. That is the majority of the plot here. It is a lot of him dealing with the manipulative guard and the untrustworthy inmate who can get him a cellphone. Around every corner is pain and suffering, with no hope to be found.
John Leguizamo stars as Misael. He does not have a lot of dialogue. His main job is to portray a man trying to keep himself moving through despair. We learn precisely what is necessary to know about this man to understand what is happening to him. The only backstory the audience is given is details of the incident that led to him being locked up. Otherwise, information about what kind of man Misael is gets imparted through his reactions and the way his wife talks to him. Most of what Leguizamo does is react. He is good at showing various emotions (anger, hopelessness, fear, desperation, etc.) just from the way he holds his head. I don’t know if it can truly be said that he plays a character in Dark Blood, though he certainly plays the situation effectively.
The direction, by Harold Trompetero, is steady in the way it focuses on the unpleasant conditions of the prison’s day-to-day life; the state of the prison itself and the people who occupy it (guards and prisoners). His eye is trained on Misael. There is no bigger picture, no context for why the head guard is so mean or why the individual prisoners behave the way they do. This is a dark, grimy, movie. You can practically feel the dirt in the cells and the courtyard. The sole touching aspect is the dog who roams the grounds and takes a liking to Misael. Yet even the friendly animal’s presence brings with it the possibility of tragedy. There is the feeling that any scene could end in suffering. Many of them do.
Dark Blood is like that all throughout. It follows Misael from punishment to punishment, some physical, some emotional. It is absolutely not an easy viewing experience. The movie both works and doesn’t because of how committed it is to seeing what happens to this man. More insight into who Misael is could have added to its power and potentially lessened the repetition a bit. Still, John Leguizamo is definitely compelling enough in the role to carry it from beginning to end and Trompetero creates a really strong sense of location. It seems that they set out to make a dark, sad, at times disturbing, movie. They have succeeded.
-Ben Pivoz
