IN BLOOM, the debut feature from director/writer Chris Michael Birkmeier, a genre mixture tale in Chicago, recounts the ups-and-downs of a young couple Kurt (Wigent) and Paul (Rittenhouse), the former is a drug-dealer, but his clientèle are mostly hipster youngsters, so it is not a swearing, gun-crazy thriller one might expect for this sort of job; but Paul is a clerk in a supermarket, who scorns this line-of-work, yet as long as it pays for the bills, he can just condone it. A looming danger which quite inferiorly sets the suspenseful tone is a serial killer on the lam, whose victims are uniformly young males, which is haphazardly reminded from news flashes on TV and a random enactment. In the midstream, a stimulation to mislead us Kurt is going to be the next victim, until edging to the coda, a final victim would supposedly thrust a revelation for Kurt about the profundity of love, which frankly speaking, is quite a lame strategy to choose this particular object.
Apparently, the central story is an ever-so-common relationship quandary, Kurt is the variant who is frustrated and scared to find out the sexual attraction has dwindled, which for any mature mind, it is a sign that their relationship eases into another critical phase, when passion turns into the form of a deeper love. But as a young blood, he clearly is not that smart, and incited by external temptation from one of his client Kevin (Fane), he breaks off the relationship, but the new lifestyle is not his messiah, when remorse overcomes, can he mend his mistake?
Generally speaking, IN BLOOM looks rather cheap in appearance, especially the night time scenes, amateurish and uninspiring, the storyline awkwardly fatigues although the two leads strives to perk up the borderline insufferable narrative to some extent. By any criterion, it is difficult to pick anything singular for praise, on the whole, the film's sole plausible excuse of its existence is that it enters on a gay couple, otherwise, hopefully years later, when we look back from a time when sexuality will no longer be an irrelevant topic, the movie will be remissly regarded as one of the anachronism from a bygone era, that will be the best scenario ever!
