Angelina Jolie's new film as director is a big failure

TORONTO, Canada – Two riders appear on a hill in the wide plain, five pursuers hot on their heels. Shots ring out and one of the men falls from his horse. The second is not so lucky: he is tied with a lasso and pulled off his stallion and is dragged behind his attacker for what seems like an eternity.

The camera follows him, capturing this in a widescreen panorama that is all the more terrifying because of its striking composition. Off-screen, a narrator talks about the need to “break open the earth” to create “a better world” in which everyone has the right to happiness and dignity – a fate that is clearly not reserved for these unfortunate individuals.

The identity of these murdered men is never revealed by Without bloodand that fits with its total lack of specificity. This historical film, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Alessandro Baricco by writer-director Angelina Jolie, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, is characterized by its lack of specificity.

The idea is to create a timeless parable about the lasting effects of violence on victims and perpetrators, on the injured and the unharmed, but the result is initially confusing and later frustratingly poor. Because the story remains abstract, it only conveys general and empty truths.

After the first scene, Without blood segues to an elderly gentleman named Manuel (Alfredo Herrera) relaxing on his porch, elbows propped on the railing, lost in thought. Jolie doesn't reveal what year we're in or what country we're in, but it appears to be Mexico in the mid-20th century.

His reverie is interrupted by the distant sound of a car, and he responds by running in and ordering his son (Alessandro D'Antuono) to get his guns. The boy dutifully carries out this task while Manuel hides his stoic daughter Nina (Karolay Fernandez) under the floorboards of the house. It seems that great mischief is afoot, and it comes in the form of three visitors led by Salinas (Juan Minujín), a man in a white linen suit whose upper lip is covered in an impressive mustache and whose hand is adorned with a shiny gold ring.

A shootout ensues, ending when the youngest of the three attackers, 17-year-old Tito (Ariel Pérez Lima), gets ahead of his father, who turns out to be a doctor. Shot in the shoulder, he is confronted by Salinas, who reprimands him for crimes he committed during a recent war. In particular, Salinas is enraged by the doctor's murderous treatment of his patients at the local hospital, which included Salinas' beloved brother (Andrés Delgado).

When he tells how he found his sibling and was forced to end his life due to his condition, the doctor denies any wrongdoing and argues that the war is now over. Salinas, however, disagrees; for him, the conflict rages on. The doctor cannot escape this confrontation, nor can his son. Although she is discovered in her hiding place, the girl is spared and survives, although the killers subsequently set fire to her house.

Decades later, a well-dressed Nina (Salma Hayek Pinault) walks into a newsstand and asks Tito (Demián Bichir) if she can buy him a lottery ticket. The man obliges, and Nina invites him for a drink. He declines, and she repeats the question twice more, each time with a sterner look that makes it clear she won't take no for an answer. They sit down at a fancy restaurant and start talking, and it's not long before Tito confesses that he knows who she is, as he was the teenage gunman who left her alive during the massacre of her loved ones.

“Some stories are meant to have a moral. That's what they're meant to do. They're meant to say something profound,” Nina muses, and her own story is a shocking litany of misery. After the deaths of her father and brother, Nina was taken in by a nun who gave her to a pharmacist (Pedro Hernández), who told her horror stories while she lay on his lap, and the sight of his hand sliding down her body suggests that his behavior toward her was anything but appropriate.

The pharmacist then lost Nina at cards to the Count (Luis Alberti), who married her at 14, which led to further pedophile abuse. She gave birth to three children to her husband, from whom she was later separated when she was declared insane and placed in an asylum after the Count's death.

Without blood ticks many boxes when it comes to sexist injustice, but the vagueness of every single element of the film makes it paper-thin. Nina doesn't recount her entire ordeal; she lets Tito fill in the gaps from his perspective. What he does reveal is that he spent many years trying to find and kill Nina, fearing she might remember his face and betray him (or worse).

When he heard that his compatriots had died under mysterious circumstances, he knew their reappearance was inevitable. What he probably didn't know, however, was that their conversation would drag on so painfully, with the two constantly interrupting their tales to stare at each other in oh-so-meaningful silence.

Hayek Pinault's pleasant demeanor is belied by her evil eyes, but her relationship with Bichir does not come close to the dynamics of the similar, superior Death and the Girl. In fact, their back-and-forth is often sluggish, suggesting there isn't enough material to fill even a 91-minute film. Face-to-face with the woman he hurt, Bichir's Tito mostly just looks lost, and the director's flashbacks are clumsily woven into the main action. For all the echoes she creates between present and past, Jolie only succeeds in conveying that formative traumas linger long after superficial scars have healed.

Without historical context and details, Without blood fails to grapple with the atrocities of yesterday and today; its protagonists and tragedies are mere intellectual concepts, divorced from anything that might give them meaning. As a result, its unresolved ending feels less like a question to be pondered after the lights come on, and more like another of the film's affected gestures.