Blood Lines

Directed by Gail Maurice, Blood Lines details the complications that ensue between Dana Solomon’s Beatrice and Derica Lafrance’s Chani after they embark on an unexpected romance – with Beatrice’s fractured relationship with her mother (Maurice’s Leonore) and Chani’s efforts at finding her birth family compounding the couple’s attempts at happiness. Filmmaker Maurice, armed with her own screenplay, delivers a well-intentioned yet hopelessly uninvolving and inert endeavor that contains few attributes designed to capture and sustain the viewer’s interest, with the arms-length atmosphere exacerbated by an often breathtakingly deliberate pace, Steve Cosens’ bland visuals, and performances that run the gamut from barely-passable to flat-out amateurish. There’s ultimately never a point at which one is able to work up the slightest bit of interest in or enthusiasm for the protagonists’ subdued antics, and while picture’s whiplash-inducing third-act shift from mundane to salacious admittedly perks up the proceedings (albeit all-too-briefly), Blood Lines does, in the end, come off as a woefully lackluster piece of work that contains little of the charm present in Maurice’s debut, 2022’s Rosie.

* out of ****