BLOOD ON HER NAME WRITES ITS SIGNATURE ON FANTASIA

Director Matthew Pope‘s directorial debut recently made his world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal with his full length feature Blood on Her Name.  In a weekend where a heat dome was covering southern Ontario, including Montreal, perhaps a lot of the audience, including myself, felt the humidity and the pressure that Bethany Anne Lind (Ozark, The Walking Dead) was feeling playing the character of Leigh Tiller.  Especially right off the get go when we find her in distress in the garage that she owns because of a dead man’s body on the ground.  You can feel that instant heat of the Southern Gothic style of genre from Matthew Pope as Leigh starts to figures out what to do with the body in what is a hot and sticky situation. Her conscience starts to get to her so she returns the body in a shed where his family resides and things start to get very interesting for the audience as they start to unravel the mystery as to why the dead body was there.  Unfortunately, for the main charcter of Leigh, her deadly downward spiral begins the minute the movie begins.

The audience is then introduced to her fifteen year old son Ryan, who is played by Jared Ivers, who must go see a parole officer and is looking like he is headed to jail like that of his father.  Ryan seems to have some indication as to what went on the night of the murder in the garage but it seems he is still coping with the fact that he had made another teenager blind from a previous encounter.  Leigh’s estranged father comes into the mix as he starts to follow his daughter around town because he’s town sheriff as well.  Played by Will Patton (Halloween, No Way Out, Armageddon), Sheriff Richard Tiller starts to figure out why her daughter is under so much stress and literally looking like shit.  Then there is her co-worker Rey, played by Jimmy Gonzales, who works at the Tiller Garage and sees Leigh being really shady and sketchy everyday but has much love for her son whom he teaches auto mechanics to.  Not to mention, the family of the dead man from the garage who must be trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Bethany Anne Lind just blows away the audience in the film and its her performance that makes her chemistry amongst all the other actors/actresses that much better.  Blood On Her Name is a character driven film that you digest with Leigh’s paranoid, tense but yet conscientous character.  Her struggle between what is right and what is wrong and directing her moral compass in what she believes to be in the true direction under her disturbing circumstances is all acted out to the tee.  Being the centre of attention, the audience tends to root for this anti-hero of Leigh Tiller to get her out of her predicament but she tends to throw it away when she gets paranoid and has flashbacks of her estranged childhood.  Nonetheless, she has a family to protect and a dead body that someone is going to find about.  During this journey of Leigh will remind of that time you done something morally wrong and you feel the anxiety taking over you before someone finds out and all hell breaks loose.   The result is never a pretty picture.  Not even for a hot minute.

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