THE BLOODY CHILD

The Bloody Child was inspired by a real incident: A young U.S. marine, recently back from fighting in the gulf war, murdered his wife and was caught trying to bury her in the Mojave Desert by two military policemen on patrol. But The Bloody Child doesn't proceed like a crime story in any ordinary sense; the focus is on the arrest rather than on the crime, which is never shown. We are also taken into the lives of the marine captain played by Tinka Menkes and other soldiers in the area, but not into the life or mind or motivations of the murderer, who is never heard and is seen only from behind or from a distance. The disembodied voice of the murdered wife is heard periodically (much of what she says comes from Shakespeare's «Macbeth»), but she never figures as a character in any ordinary sense. (...) I can't deny that The Bloody Child, which is subtitled An Interior of Violence, taps into something central and irreducible about the pervasive role of violence in contemporary American culture that no other picture gets at - something at once chilling and clarifying, and only purified by the movie's compulsive, purposeful repetitions. Because the Menkes sisters seem to be more intuitive than schematic in the way they work they have allowed us to look into an abyss. (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

New copy from the collection of the Academy Film Archive