Fantasia 2024 Review: IN OUR BLOOD, Using Documentary Sensibilities to Elevate Found Footage Horror

Emily is making a documentary about reconnecting with her estranged mother, Sam. Emily was removed from their home when she was just a teenager and put in foster care because of her mother’s addiction. Years later, Sam wants to reconnect. She’s cleaned up and kicked her addiction. She wants to be a part of Emily’s life once again. With her cinematographer Danny by her side, Emily heads to her hometown of Las Cruces, New Mexico. 

 

Everything seems on the level. Sam invites them into her home, has dinner with them and tries to prove that she has turned her life around. The next day she disappears and is nowhere to be found. Emily and Danny search for her and soon learn that Las Cruces has become a place where the most vulnerable people go missing every day. Working their way through the Las Cruces community, through its bright and dark spots, they discover what secrets lie beneath it all.

 

Once and a while someone comes along and does justice to the found footage genre, one that is inundated with lame attempts at eliciting jump scares and chills. That’s all good if you like stunt scares but what if you really want to sink your teeth into your audience for a truly chilling effect? Well, you have to make them invest in your story. And how do you do that? You draw them in with a good mystery, a good story, led by characters you wish more for than a cheap death.

 

To do that you need someone who understands what it means to capture the human moments, to capture real life as it happens. Documentarian Pedro Kos’ first foray into narrative filmmaking, after earning an Oscar nomination for their documentary work among other accolades, does so by looking at the humanity of the situation first, before diving into the otherworldly. You get their first narrative feature film, the mystery horror thriller, In Our Blood. 

 

Steven Klein, Aaron Kogan, Clay Tweel and screenplay writer Mallory Westfall created a story that looks into the community of Las Cruces, and the work done by members of that community to care for folks like Sam. You can take a documentarian out of the format but you cannot easily dissect them from those instincts that they’ve been working on since the beginning of their career. Kos is going to do what he did best and by the end you will see what real-life elements they were able to incorporate into their film. 

 

A key dark point of living in Las Cruces is the local gang, Los Carniceros, who may or may not be involved in the disappearances. For example, gangs using migrants or the unhoused as drug mules is not uncommon. That could be what happened to Sam and others. It would explain the severed pig's head Emily finds in the bathroom of her mom's home later on (an element of the story revealed in a preview clip released days before the world premiere). It is also part of an interesting wrinkle in the story about Danny, played by E.J. Bonilla. 

 

What we learn about his past during the film means that Emily is in a position where only she can put herself in harm's way. Danny cannot get in trouble with the cops, nor can he be found out by other undesired elements in Las Cruces either. If someone like him is found out he could just as easily disappear as well. It is a well thought out character that keeps our focus on Emily. 

 

What we like about In Our Blood is that it maintained its mystery right up until the very end. We could say, oh, we had an idea of what was going to happen, there were a couple things early on in the story that suggested as such. But with nothing substantially revealed yet we were okay with mere speculation. Even though our suspicions were confirmed, when events unfold in the climax there are a few surprises for the viewer that we think you will appreciate. Well worth the trip. 

 

When the extraordinary plot points kick in Kos and company do not skimp on the details either. This will please viewers waiting for more horror elements. What, on top of the severed pig head? Yes. Personally, we felt that this was perhaps taken one step too far into the unbelievable and mileage will vary, but that is at the very end.

 

Until that point we greatly appreciated the gradual build towards that crazy ending. An ending not wholly unexpected by long time horror fans but the journey more than made up for it.