Film #27 — 3/5 Zombie Films
By C. Ramsay
Leading with a very accomplished, atmospheric opening in which community members of the Mi’kmaq reserve of Red Crow begin to realize that a zombie outbreak is spreading, Blood Quantum begins with a lot of promise. The cinematography in the first act is gorgeous, capturing the beauty of the landscape and treating the environment as its own character, or at least recognizing its agency. The camerawork features some forced perspective changes that are sickening in how they move, indicating an as yet unknowable danger flooding in and making the space feel oppressive no matter how open it is. Considering that the Indigenous population is immune to the outbreak plaguing the predominantly white population nearby, and that the environment is historically consistently mishandled when not under Indigenous stewardship, the spread of disease implied through the motion of the camera is a strong foundational component in the type of storytelling that one would hope would extend throughout the rest of the film.
Regrettably, the effectiveness of the first act does not carry through as the camerawork is much more inventive with the landscapes than it is the people. Once the audience has been introduced to the core group of characters and the emphasis remains with them, the cinematography quickly feels dimmed and unsure of how to continue contributing to a storytelling style based as much on showing as it is telling. As a result, the back two thirds are bogged down by the amount of exposition they contain, leaving aspects such as generational trauma with underexplored nuance that make what should be load-bearing characterization feel surface-level.
(more…)