Once every year or two a movie comes along that brings fresh energy to the found-footage horror movie, a terrain that’s been mercilessly, repetitiously over-tilled since “The Blair Witch Project” broke out a quarter-century ago. Unfortunately, “In Our Blood” does not capture that prize for 2024. Though a notch above the subgenre’s norm in terms of acting and production polish, documentarian Pedro Kos’ first narrative feature — in which two filmmakers investigate mysterious disappearances around Las Cruces, New Mexico — ultimately teases expectations too long en route to an underwhelming resolution.
With overt horror elements delayed until the last 20 minutes or so, the film ends up feeling like an attenuated prologue for a series in the general conceptual (if not budgetary) wheelhouse of “Blade” or “Underworld.” But it’s anyone’s guess whether this Fantasia premiere will spark the kind of enthusiasm that merits a single follow-up, let alone several.
Emily (Brittany O’Grady) is driving to the southwest from Los Angeles with chatty, genial cameraman Danny (E.J. Bonilla). She’s hired him to film the trip for its personal importance and dramatic potential, since they’ll be visiting the mother she was separated from at age 13, and hasn’t seen in a decade. Emily says ex-addict Samantha (Alanna Ubach) is “not a bad person, she just made a lot of bad choices and hurt a lot of people.” (Danny, too, has maternal wounds — his mother got deported when he was a child.) So it’s an awkward reunion, with Sam “wanting to make it right” with her skeptical daughter, proving that she’s now clean and duly employed.
Her job is at the Hooper Center, a community organization with a “campus of nonprofits … for the unhoused and vulnerable populations” of this desert county. The visiting duo interview residents who have been beneficiaries of its programs, including drug rehab and treatment for mental health problems. But those conversations tend to bend towards whispered rumors of abductions and violence. Sam herself says a close friend recently went missing, then was found dead, adding, “I know it could have been me instead of her.” There’s a vehement defensiveness to community members’ reluctance to be filmed, despite permission granted by frostily composed chief administrator Ana (Krisha Fairchild).
The newcomers’ vague suspicions turn to alarm once Sam disappears, followed by other unsettling events — often accompanied by severed pig’s heads and poisoned rats left behind at locations where our protagonists had previously spoken to locals. Clearly someone wants to scare them off from uncovering whatever dark hidden truth controls much of life (and death) hereabouts.
There’s always an intriguing pull to narratives involving a cult, which is what we soon fear Hooper Center really is beneath its surface altruism. Our heroes are engaging enough, with a sometimes-testy dynamic that Mallory Westfall’s screenplay keeps professional, with no hint of potential romance included or needed. Supporting figures (also including Bianca Comparato and Steven Klein as an area couple, plus Leo Marks as an unstable Center case) make promising first impressions they’re seldom allowed to build on. Their number encompass actual residents of Camp Hope, a self-governing “transitional community” for indigents in Las Cruces that gets thanked in the final credits.
But finally this fictive mystery doesn’t say much about homelessness or anything else, wasting its offbeat setting on a supernatural denouement that boasts two major twists. One is disappointingly familiar in genre terms. The other adds a note of “Matrix”-like larger conspiracy that arrives too late, in too small-scaled a film, to have the jaw-dropping impact intended.
It doesn’t help that while “In Our Blood” is indeed bloody at times (primarily thanks to those decapitated hogs), and moves at a decent clip, Kos doesn’t demonstrate any great knack for building an ominous atmosphere, or delivering scary sequences. Mostly shot in bright southwestern daylight, the movie keeps us interested, but fails to accrue much suspense. One suspects the filmmakers would have preferred to make a documentary about the tent city they made locational use of — because the horror opus they’ve chosen to set there feels like a grudging commercial necessity rather than a fully developed imaginative commitment.
