'Without Blood' Review
Release Date: 09/18/26 [Cinemas]
Genre: Drama. War.
MPAA: Not Rated.
Distributor: Brainstorm Media.
The Verdict: A Mistake
Without Blood is a ninety-minute contemplation of war and the consequences of violence on the everyday people who suffer most. We’re immediately dropped into a farmhouse where a father, his son, and his daughter live a seemingly idyllic life. Until the trio of men with guns show up, that is. They accuse the father, a doctor, of mistreating his patients. An incredibly young girl, Nina, hides beneath the floorboards with blood dripping onto her ankles as both her father and brother are killed. The youngest man in the trio, Tito, eventually discovers her hiding place, but he lets her live.
Time skips ahead, and an older Nina (Salma Hayek Pinault) has tracked down Tito (Demián Bichir). The rest of the movie follows them talking at a cafe, interspersed with flashbacks of how their lives unfolded after the farmhouse incident. Unfortunately, this quite interesting philosophical reflection on the effects of war makes for a very uninteresting movie.
True to the source novel Senza Sangue by Italian writer Alessandro Baricco, there is no context here. We don’t know where we are, what time period we’re in, or what war Nina and Tito are discussing. Everything (aside from the very obvious theme summed up in the final scene) is intentionally vague, including the flashbacks, which are unreliable and so riddled with ambiguity that they become almost meaningless. Hayek Pinault and Bichir have little to work with, but still somehow manage to cobble together meaningful performances. That’s partly thanks to the cinematography by Seamus McGarvey, who focuses on close-ups that let Hayek Pinault and Bichir’s faces do the heavy lifting.
Director (and co-writer alongside Baricco) Angelina Jolie is no stranger to war movies. Four of her five narrative feature films have dealt with the subject, and this effort is by far the most introspective. And perhaps that is its biggest problem—Without Blood is best consumed on the page, not the screen.
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