Bleed With Me (Fantasia Fest)
**Seen for the 2020 Fantasia International Film Festival.
Whenever a movie makes you feel as though your heart skips a beat or two, you’re watch a movie that will linger. “Bleed With Me” might very well be that movie at this year’s Fantasia Fest. It’s (potentially) a monster movie, but it’s also a psychological horror film about that touches on ideas like gaslighting, self-harm, PTSD and women finding strength within their connections to one another. The way it gets there is exciting to experience.
We open with Rowan (Lee Marshall) lying down in the back of a car. She is struggling emotionally, and her friend, Emily (Lauren Beatty) is driving her for a winter getaway as a secluded cabin her family owns. The weekend will also include Emily’s boyfriend, Brendan (Aris Tyros), who is understanding of the situation, but nonetheless, was still hoping for a weekend where it was just them. As they settle in, Emily tries to press Rowan on her life, and she’s apprehensive, but eventually opens up. As the night falls, however, Rowan is unable to calm down. She wakes up in the middle of the night, and thinks she sees Emily there. She also finds real cuts on her arm. But she doesn’t remember doing that…or is she doing this in her sleep?
From that description, you can see where all of those ideas I mentioned earlier come into play. What makes “Bleed With Me” so involving is the way writer-director Amelia Moses twists them into something we didn’t expect. Rowan is very obviously fragile emotionally, but it’s not whom we expect that’s manipulating her, and it may not even be for reasons we expect. We understand Rowan’s anxiety about it, though, and Marshall’s performance puts us right into the middle of her emotional state; it’s a striking piece of acting, and the contrast between her and Emily makes their connection all the stronger. This is a film described as being about co-dependency, and that’s actually a good way of putting it, and one of the things the film gets right about that type of relationship is the way that both people require the connection to maintain some stability, not just one or the other. Here is another example I’ve seen in 2020 about female filmmakers capturing an emotion with imagination and subtle power through cinema (Amy Seimetz’s “She Dies Tomorrow” did similarly), and this one draws you in carefully, and builds its tension in a manner that makes the moments of surprise land all the stronger.
Something like “Bleed With Me” asks us for empathy when it comes to its characters, and their emotions, but doesn’t demand it in a heavy-handed way. This is a film where character-building is put at a simmer, with the plot elements added at just the right moment where they will land with us. This is a movie hard to shake. It’s probably best you don’t try to.
