Angelina Jolie has long been fascinated by the ways in which war impacts people’s lives and the generations beyond that. In her latest directorial feature, Without Blood, we follow a little girl named Nina whose family is ravaged by an act of violence in the aftermath of an unnamed conflict. Nina lives on, revenge becoming the driving force of her life.
The decades-spanning tale is mostly a two-hander between Salma Hayek Pinault and Demián Bichir, two actors at the top of their game. First, though, Jolie reveals what exactly happened to Pinault’s Nina. In a scene evocative of westerns, we see men somewhere in Mexico killing their enemies on horseback before arriving at a house to get revenge on a doctor, Nina's father, who wronged them. The war is over, he pleads, there's no need to do this. But just becasue one side has one does not mean the violence is over.
Revenge Drives Much Of Without Blood
The Film Asks What Revenge Really Does For Those Who Seek It Out
Like family curses and genetic conditions, revenge can be passed down from generation to generation, too. It becomes an ugly cycle of emotional and physical violence. Nina is continuing this cycle when we first meet her as an adult. She approaches Bichir’s Tito at his newsstand and invites him for a drink. He’s thrown off that this well-dressed woman would ask him such a thing, but he puts two-and-two together quickly enough.
Much of Without Blood is spent following one long conversation between the pair, fleshing out the intervening years between the opening scene and the dinner they are having in flashback. Jolie frames much of this conversation in tight close-ups of Pinault and Bichir’s faces, cigarettes hanging delicately between lips or perched resolutely between fingers. We spend more time with them than we do in the past.
It’s a seduction of sorts. Nina wants to reel Tito into her tragic story, eliciting some emotion from the man who ruined her family. He isn’t on the defense, though. Instead, he explains all the little ways in which he still touched her life after they parted ways all those years ago. The world is small and those connected by conflict and violence are often pulled back to one another by unseen forces.
Despite sturdy performances, Without Blood doesn’t fully come together. Its use of flashbacks is an interesting choice, but I found myself wondering why the story was told this way instead of in chronological order. Both would weave grand stories reaching through time to culminate in this climactic conversation. But the flashbacks make the characters feel thin, their inner lives hidden in all the things from the past we do not see.
You could make an argument that this is the point. War and trauma often cause people to lose memory or obfuscate the truth to protect themselves and those they love. That doesn’t seem to be the case here, though. Nina remembers everything, so much so that she’s already carried out two brutal acts of revenge against the men who visited her on that fateful day when she was a little girl.
Tito is unsure of what she wants ultimately. To kill him, even though he saved her that day? To look in his eyes and see if any regret is engraved in the wrinkles and lines and scars that mark his face? To just be able to say her piece and leave it at that? I'm not sure Nina knows what she wants either, save for making sure that Tito knows she still carries what happened to her all these years later.
The war had ended for the country, but Nina has had to fight a war all her life, from when was an orphan to years later as a child-bride and eventual institutionalization. This all happened because of what Tito and his accomplices did, directly and indirectly. Tito's complicity in later moments of her life only further proves this. It's as if Without Blood is saying that physical manifestations of war and trauma are like ghosts – they haunt Nina and Tito, allowing them live their normal lives while spectres of regret and violence linger close by.
Without Blood had its premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. The film is 91 minutes long and is not yet rated.
