समाचार

Author: Daniel Goodwin

From its bleak but stunning opening shot of an ominous evening sky, Australian director Steven Kastrissios builds an immediate, prevalent sense of foreboding for his second feature, Bloodlands. Kastrissios’ first film in nearly ten years (since 2008’s The Horseman) charts the tale of a penurious Albanian blood feud between a lowly local family and a coterie of cannibals, witches and ghosts.

For a film which so accurately depicts such raw, rundown communities, the paranormal elements meld surprisingly well with the realism, even when accentuated to be predominantly weird and gothic. Slabs of floating meat, cloaked, mystical figures and delirious nightmare scenes make Bloodlands resound like a lunatic’s fever dream instead of a slice of social commentary about Albanian culture and society. The subject of Balkan blood feuds have previously been tackled in fictional cinema in Joshua Marston’s The Forgiveness of Blood, among other more conventional Albanian features,...