Warm Blood (2022 | USA | 86 minutes | Rick Charnoski)
When I finished watching Rick Charnoski’s narrative feature debut, I was so bowled over I had to see it a second time in as many days on a festival screen—just to determine if my immense love for it was the cinematic equivalent of an immediate, all-consuming crush that evaporates in the harsh light of day. Upon second viewing, I realized my movie-crush was no fluke.
Warm Blood follows Red (Haley Isaacson), an emotionally numbed runaway recovering from a stint in a mental hospital. She’s taken to survival by stealing and conning her way through her hometown of Redondo, CA in the mid ’80s. Red crosses paths with another aimless teenager, Tom (Ryan Toothman), and the two of them encounter numerous denizens of the city’s run-down streets.
There’s not much of a plot to speak of here; just Red navigating through her literal hard-knock life, with Charnoski taking periodic detours to explore some of Modesto’s other characters on the fringe, to varying degrees of thoroughness. If the setup smacks of yet another indie movie about teenagers in suburbia, that’s just a minimal scratch at the surface.
The shadow of the deceptively benign human wax figure that was Ronald Reagan looms large over Warm Blood, his words ringing with spectacular hollowness as Red and Tom wander the litter-scabbed Modesto streets and stagnant local waters burble grotesquely with pollution. A serial killer may or may not be on the prowl, and the mounting stack of bodies is covered with customary muck-raking vigor by a local news crew. All along the way, people drift in and out of Red’s and Tom’s purview, most of them every bit as directionless as the ostensible protagonists.
Christopher Blauvelt, a veteran lensman who’s shot films for Gus Van Sant and Kelly Reichart, gives Modesto a sun-bleached, gritty look (if this wasn’t shot on 16mm, the movie does a damn good job of looking like it was), and the combination of actors and real folks orbiting on the periphery feels so scruffily real, the line between reality and fiction often blurs to near-nonexistence (Isaacson, in her feature acting debut, captures Red’s apathy-calcified but still bleeding soul perfectly).
Charnoski’s feature debut wears its raggedness on its tattered sleeve, but it finds rough-hewn beauty amidst the ruins. It’s funny as hell, unflinchingly raw, almost B-movie tawdry in places, and contains a wordless riverside interlude so abidingly sweet and melancholy that I teared up watching it. Warm Blood’s patchwork feel and sprawling narrative resist easy genre pigeonholing, but that just makes it more memorable and special. And if it doesn’t find a distributor post-haste, the world really is as unfair as Red makes it out to be.
Warm Blood played as part of the 48th Seattle International Film Festival; keep an eye on its Instagram for updates as it seeks US Distribution.
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