Without Blood review – Angelina Jolie’s bland war drama is another failure

If only Angelina Jolie’s latest directorial effort, Without Blood, could be as sharp and consistent as her words in real life. If only the film, about the human toll of war, could draw blood the way she does.

Jolie, a filmmaker and former UN ambassador, has long been an outspoken advocate and humanitarian. She was also one of the first and remains one of the few Hollywood stars to stand up for Palestinian lives, criticizing the lack of humanitarian aid for innocent civilians.

She has previously made films about the Bosnian war (In the Land of Blood and Honey) and the Cambodian civil war (First They Killed My Father). But in Without Blood she wrestles with Alessandro Baricco’s stubbornly vague novel about the lingering traumas of an unnamed conflict.

Baricco’s text, about a man and a woman bound together by brutal acts of violence across time, resists any association with identifiable conflicts. That’s the trick to universality, a seeming generosity and downright overrated gesture. Sure, it worked for Incendies , the film Without Blood most closely resembles. But Incendies got more attention for director Denis Villeneuve’s deft hand with narrative craftsmanship, atmosphere and suspense than the story it told. And if the recent wave of more diverse storytellers has taught us anything, it’s that specificity helps anchor stories to a human experience that feels authentic and, by default, universal.

Without Blood finds its mismatched stars, Salma Hayek Pinault and Demián Bichir, struggling with words, anecdotes, and frustratingly dull and abstract conversations that feel as if they’re searching for meaning – beyond the obvious and didactic sentiment that war is damaging and solves nothing.

Hayek and Bichir (the latter does a slightly better job with the hollow material) play Nina and Tito. We can only guess that they live in Mexico in the mid-1950s, though that is never stated. He is the weary kiosk clerk. She is the mysterious woman who radiates mischievous warmth. Nina flirtatiously urges Tito to join her for dinner. He resists at first, before resigning himself to this fateful confrontation with the woman he met as a child, when Tito was a young rebel involved in the murder of her family.

The inciting scene is one of the few gripping moments in Without Blood , because Jolie is in the violence and lets its ugliness fester. The drawn-out confrontation—in which vengeful gunmen perpetuate a cycle of violence while delivering monologues too contrived for the cast to deliver convincingly—is Western-esque in the extreme. So is the virtuoso opening tracking shot in which horsemen lasso a young man across the sand. There’s a heaviness to the violence in these early moments that the film struggles to sustain.

In the present, Nina and Tito take turns telling their own stories to each other, feeling as though they know each other’s next move. And occasionally they make exaggerated gestures to score dramatic points. At one point, Hayek slowly turns a porcelain cup 180 degrees by its handle as she underscores a revelation. She does it with such self-satisfaction that it’s almost parodic.

They unpack the sprawling narrative, where there are no clear heroes or villains, especially for the audience, and chronicle the cascade of violence, sexual abuse, dehumanization, and trauma since their final confrontation. Tito is especially haunted by what Nina has endured, the gender divide in how war is experienced made explicit. Moments where Nina captures Tito’s existence as a performance of normalcy, even when she’s performing basic functions and looking straight out at the street, transcend, even if the observation seems written more for the movies than for life.

Without Blood traffics in tropes, often deliberately. There’s the aforementioned Western iconography mixed with elements of lavish spy thrillers or 1950s melodramas. The film, like the novel, indulges in genre, perhaps as a deconstruction of how these stories celebrate violence and heroism. Or maybe genre is just another refuge from the real world.

Jolie also lays it on thick stylistically, as if to compensate for the emptiness at the core of her lush, sepia-toned film. Without Blood is littered with contrived imagery—from the sentimental slow-motion sequences with golden light bouncing off the lens, to the glistening wet cobblestone streets as Nina trudges across them in heels toward her target.

Surprisingly, the film strikes a powerful note in its final moments, where the ambiguity works to its advantage. Jolie abandons the characters in a moment that is both comforting and unsettling, where the sense of inevitability that has dictated their lives up to that point fades away and we are left with no idea of their intentions or whether they know how to proceed.