Directed by Blaine Thurier
Written by Blaine Thurier and Leonard Farlinger
Starring Alanna Bale, Luke Bilyk, Vinessa Antoine, Ella Jonas Farlinger, Benjamin Sutherland and Rosemary Dunsmore
Runtime: 80 minutes
Premieres at TIFF on September 10th

by Gary M. Kramer, Staff Writer

There is something peculiar about Anna (Alanna Bale), the vampire protagonist of Kicking Blood. Sure, she feeds off Gerry (Shaun Austin-Olsen) because he upset her terminally ill friend Bernice (Rosemary Dunsmore), but when Anna encounters Robbie (Luke Bilyk), a down on his luck alcoholic, she refuses to “convert” him despite the fact that he very much wants to die. Is Anna a vampire with a conscience?

Directed and written (with Leonard Farlinger) by Blaine Thurier (formerly of the band The New Pornographers), this anemic film is not without style—the film has a nifty low-budget, minimalist aesthetic (there are never more than four people in a scene)—but it does not have much in the way of substance. Even as Robbie poses the questions to Anna: Where do we go when we die?, her answer is practically a shrug.

Kicking Blood does capture the existential despair that both Robbie and Anna face. He has decided to stop drinking, and she is, likewise, “kicking blood.” However, their parallel experiences, which involve hallucinations—his described, hers displayed—reveal little, and not too much is known about their characters. He used to work as a dishwasher; she has a job in a library. When they first meet, she offers him 80-year-old scotch, which he seductively purrs, is, “Smoky, like [Anna’s] eyes.” She counters, “I don’t fuck humans.” However, the couple do, later, end up in bed together.

Anna’s compassion for Robbie shows her softening heart. She tries to convince her fellow vampires, Nina (Ella Jonas Farlinger) and Boris (Benjamin Sutherland), not to feed on Lara (Kristin Shepherd), an artist, but they don’t listen. Kicking Blood keeps most of the violence off-screen, which is admirable, but it also keeps most of the tension off-screen, too. When Robbie invites Nina and Boris into Anna’s lair (“loft” or “apartment” fail to do the place justice), Anna tells him to run. Robbie goes and stays with Vinessa (Vinessa Antoine), his ex, who seems to only want to ply him with alcohol, ignoring the fact that he told her he’s on the wagon. (Her reasons for this are as mysterious as why they broke up).

It is appealing that most of human characters are all fatalistic—in addition to Robbie, Bernice, and Lara, there is Ben (Josh Bainbridge), who thinks Nina and Boris want to party—while a vampire is into saving lives. The moral of the film is, “Be who you really are,” but the characters are too generic for viewers to be emotionally invested in them.

The performances are appropriately low-key, but that may just be a result of the actors being given too little to do. Only Benjamin Sutherland’s Boris and Vinessa Antoine’s Vinessa seem to have any verve.

Thurier just plays things too cool. There is an effective shot of a corpse bleeding from the eye, and a pair of teasing scenes of Anna and Robbie encountering sunlight (she dares to be in it, he hides from it), along with some nice fade-outs into color. But there is not enough meat on the bones here. Kicking Blood is oddly both toothless and bloodless.