BLESSID

A suicidal woman in the latter stages of pregnancy struggles with ghosts from her past, a husband she doesn’t love, and a stalker-ex-boyfriend. As if that isn’t enough, a weird stranger just moved in across the street…

Blessid is the newest film from award winning director Rob Fitz (God of Vampires) and writer Robert Heske. Described as a drama with obvious moral-spiritual undertones, Blessid could also be defined as a thriller-horror.

The film’s protagonist is a young, pregnant woman named Sarah Duncliffe. While pregnancy is a happy and hopeful time for many women, in spite of their physical condition, Sarah feels embittered, trapped and morose. Edward Duncliffe is Sarah’s husband, a real creep of a man who’s so egotistical and unfeeling that he demands sex from his wife at the end stage of her third trimester. His gift to her afterward is a self-help book about how to be happy. Edward is also in the habit of cheating on his wife, under the guise of prolonged business trips.

To further muddy up Sarah’s life, she’s being stalked by Evan, a man Sarah had an alcohol-inspired one-time-thing with before she got pregnant. Evan insists that he’s the only one who understands Sarah, and that he’s the father of Sarah’s baby. An additional problem is that Sarah suffers from ongoing hallucinatory flashbacks of her dead sister Tracy, who appears to have drowned when she was a little girl. There are also images of Sarah’s mother, who physically abuses and blames Sarah for Tracy’s death. Then, when a mysterious, black-toothed weed-thief named Jedediah Cross moves in across the street, things go from bad to ominous.

If all of this sounds a little hard to believe, it is. And while complicated plots are not necessarily bad things, the ending of Blessid is just a little too compact, manipulated, forced, and preachy for my taste. One of the main problems I have with the writing in the final scene is that Sarah’s responses to Jedediah seem too accepting, when in all segments prior to that, Sarah reacts in just the opposite way. That’s what feels the most unbelievable to me.

I’m also of the opinion that a story shouldn’t go off in too many tangents. If thrill and horror is the goal, then stay in that genre. It’s only when a film attempts to take on more than it should that it becomes contrived.

In spite of this, Blessid is blessed with a good director and extremely talented actors, and this helps to move the film along at a decent pace. It also helps that the first half of Blessid is very compelling.

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