Films rarely nail the nuanced intuitive nature of adolescence and all its contradictory confusions as well as Carly May Borgstrom's Spirit In The Blood, a rousing, soul stirring, at times unbearably suspenseful coming of age monster movie that seems like it's going to take the utterly tired "monster solely as metaphor" route and turns it refreshingly and terrifyingly on its head. Teenage Emerson (Summer H. Howell, who played the daughter in Hunter Hunter, another incredible horror) moves back to the desolate Appalachian mining town her father (always unsettling Canadian character actor Greg Bryk) grew up in and tries to adjust to high school, bullying, family drama and that deep, melancholic sense of being adrift from one's path that only only exists for teenagers. Her father is a strange, enigmatic fellow, supportive and endearing in one note and terrifyingly volatile in the other, Bryk gives him all the requisite complexity necessary in portraying a father that echoes anything close to what is experienced in the real world. When a local girl turns up dead and eviscerated just outside of town, a panic rises among the residents, hunting parties form and nobody is quite sure what, or who they should be turning their blame to. Emerson and her newfound friend Delilah (Sarah Maxine-Racicot) navigate a burgeoning friendship with possible romantic undertones and try to fight the encroaching darkness with their own brand of nature based witchcraft which, in such a religiously inclined heartland town, is a tricky endeavour. The film manages through performances and assured direction from Borgstrom to expertly show human beings as complex, undefinable auras rather than black and white, concretely scripted characters or archetypes and feel like real, tangible life unfolding elementally in front of us. And the monster? Christ, I won't say much but I haven't seen a more hair raising, sickening turn of events in a third act in some time, it's a brutally tense, almost too real twist that lands with a reassuring thunderclap to any viewer that felt like the film was going light in the horror department up until then. Sensational piece, and one of my favourites of the year.
