Blood Stripe is a taut psychological drama about a female marine sergeant who's returned home to northern Minnesota after a few tours in Iraq & Afghanistan. The sergeant deteriorates after this latest tour and tries to find herself by going to a camp on a beautiful lake that she'd attended as a little child. There, she finds a perfect combination of relative solitude and hard work preparing the camp for its winter hiatus, but her damage is too great. The story was written by a husband and wife team (Remy Auberjonois and Kate Nowlin) who directed it (Auberjonois) and starred as the sergeant (Nowlin). What talent! There's no spurious dialog - in fact the sergeant almost never speaks. I know veterans and this is so true to my interactions with them. They never, never talk about their war experiences. There's just a short scene at the lake where the sergeant very succinctly answers questions about her service, but that's it. (This movie is not for you if you need your movies to have a lot of verbosity, backstory, and exposition.) Instead, very much like a Hemingway story, you're given the story through powerful images and terrific acting by Nowlin, Rusty Schwimmer (as Dot, the person who the sergeant helps out at the camp) and Chris Sullivan (the actor now appearing in This Is Us who plays the husband she returns to). I think one of the most powerful things about this film - and the reason I'm gifting it to friends who either regularly stream on their laptops or who have Apple TV - is how much the creative team respects their audience. You're presented this story in a way that allows you to make your own sense of it as it unfolds rather than signaling you with music or other obvious motifs on how to interpret what you're seeing or how you're supposed to feel about it. There are a couple of clues in images and music that helped me recognize the sergeant's deterioration so I never felt that I was dealing with chaos. I've used my Roku projector to play this film for my neighbors and they've all loved it. Even more of a testament, almost everyone has continued talking about the movie when we've gotten together afterwards. One couple we know asked us to put together a screening for a few of their friends.
