Every year or two, a new film comes along that brings new energy to the stock-film horror genre, an area that has been mercilessly and repeatedly overexploited since The Blair Witch Project came out a quarter-century ago. It’s a shame that In Our Blood didn’t take home the award for 2024. While it slightly outperforms the subgenre in terms of acting and production polish, documentary filmmaker Pedro Cosse’s feature debut—in which two filmmakers investigate mysterious disappearances around Las Cruces, New Mexico—ultimately raises expectations for too long on its way to a disappointing resolution.
With the overt horror elements delayed until the last twenty minutes or so, the film ends up feeling like a watered-down introduction to a series in the general (if not budget) range of Blade or Underworld. But it’s anyone’s guess whether this fantasy premiere will ignite the kind of enthusiasm that merits a single follow-up, let alone several more.
Emily (Brittany O’Grady) is driving southwest from Los Angeles with the chatty, friendly photographer Danny (E.J. Bonilla). She’s hired him to film the trip for its personal significance and dramatic potential: They’re visiting the mother she separated from at 13 and hasn’t seen in a decade. Emily says former addict Samantha (Alanna Ubach) is “not a bad person, but she made a lot of bad choices and hurt a lot of people.” (Danny also has maternal wounds—his mother was deported when he was a child.) So it’s an awkward reunion, with Sam trying to “make amends” with her skeptical daughter, proving that she’s now clean and properly employed.
Her job is at the Hopper Center, a community-based organization that includes “a group of nonprofits…for the homeless and vulnerable populations” of this desert enclave. The visiting duo interviews residents who have benefited from its programs, including drug rehab and mental health treatment. But these conversations tend to veer toward whispered rumors of kidnapping and violence. Sam herself says that a close friend recently disappeared and was found dead, adding, “I know it could have been me.” There’s a fierce defense of community members’ reluctance to be filmed, despite permission granted by the quiet board chairwoman, Anna (Krisha Fairchild).
The newcomers' vague suspicions turn to panic once Sam disappears, followed by other disturbing events – often accompanied by severed pig heads and poisoned rats left in places where our heroes previously spoke with the locals. It's clear that someone wants to scare them into revealing some dark, hidden truth that controls so much of life (and death) here.
There’s always an intriguing appeal to narratives involving a cult, and we soon fear that Hopper’s true center lies beneath his superficial altruism. Our heroes are engaging enough, with an occasionally tense dynamic maintained by Mallory Westfall’s expert screenplay, without any hint of potential romance or need for it. The supporting characters (also including Bianca Comparato and Steven Klein as a couple in the area, plus Leo Marks as the unstable center case) make promising first impressions that they’re rarely allowed to build on. They include real-life residents of Camp Hope, a self-governing “transitional community” for the poor in Las Cruces that is thanked in the end credits.
But ultimately this fantasy mystery isn’t much about homelessness or anything else, and its unconventional setting is wasted on a supernatural finale that boasts two major twists. One is disappointingly familiar in genre terms. The other adds a touch of larger, “Matrix”-like conspiracy that comes too late, in a film too small in scale, to have the intended shocking impact.
It doesn’t help that the film, while occasionally bloody (thanks in large part to those decapitated pigs) and moving at a decent pace, Cuse shows no great skill in building ominous atmosphere or delivering scares. Shot mostly in bright Southwestern daylight, the film keeps us interested but fails to generate much suspense. One suspects that the filmmakers would have preferred to make a documentary about the tent city they used as a location—because the horror they chose to film there feels more like a reluctant commercial necessity than a fully developed imaginative commitment.
