Without Blood

As a director, Angelina Jolie has made a decisive turn from her glamorous on-screen image, crafting thoughtful dramas that illuminate the horrors war visits on individuals. In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011) and First They Killed My Father (TIFF ’17) sharpen that focus further to war’s impact on women and girls in Bosnia and Cambodia, respectively. Without Blood sees Jolie returning to that neglected theme in the cinema of war. This time she directs another global screen icon, Salma Hayek Pinault.

In a frontier landscape at the beginning of the 20th century, gunmen descend on a remote farmhouse, determined to exact revenge. Their target, a doctor — alone with his son and daughter — tries desperately to protect his children. Inevitably, bullets fly.

Years later, Nina (Hayek Pinault) engages Tito (Demián Bichir), a lottery seller, in what seems like casual conversation at his kiosk. But the encounter is anything but chance. It soon dawns on him. “I know who you are,” Tito says, “and I know why you’ve come.“ As their conversation continues, it becomes clear that revenge casts a long shadow, and takes many forms.

Adapting Alessandro Baricco’s novel of the same name, Jolie maintains the book’s parable quality, but with crackling precision, especially in Hayek Pinault and Bichir’s exchanges — between a woman who witnessed her family suffer shocking violence and the man who inflicted it. Shot at Rome’s fabled Cinecittà studios, this is an intimate chamber piece about how war seeps inside each person it touches long after the weapons fall silent.

CAMERON BAILEY

Content advisory: violence