IN OUR BLOOD - Mark Reviews Movies

In Our Blood, Utopia

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 23, 2025

To even say what genre In Our Blood ultimately fits into might be giving away too much. Let's just say it's a mystery, in terms of both what it finally becomes and what the actual story is, and be finished with the teasing, already.

There's more than enough toying around on the part of screenwriter Mallory Westfall and director Pedro Kos by the end of this film. That might sound negative, but it's not intended to be so. It's impressive, really, how the filmmakers put everything we need to know and all of the essential clues right in front of us throughout this film, only for the story itself to be so grounded and compelling that we probably won't even notice the obvious.

On its face, this is stylized as a documentary being made by Emily Wyland (Brittany O'Grady), who grew up without parents or any family in her life. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her cinematographer boyfriend Danny (E.J. Bonilla), who's joining her in a mostly professional capacity on a trip back to her hometown. The occasion is a surprise letter that arrived from Emily's mother, who has written that she is sober, after many years of drug addiction, and would like a reunion with her daughter at Thanksgiving.

One of the most notable qualities of the film is how restrained it is, although the full extent of Kos' subtlety doesn't become apparent until the very end. Even the briefest of prologues here, in which Emily has a pair of keys and denounces some sort of enigmatic system directly to the camera, could have been something else entirely in retrospect. That's what we would expect if the film gave any indication as to its true purpose earlier, but in eliminating that kind of clichéd opening, Kos immediately puts us into a particular mood—for the promise of some explanation to that mysterious introduction and of complete uncertainty from the start.

Emily and Danny travel to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where Emily was born and spent some part of her childhood, before she and her mother became estranged. The young woman isn't exactly precise about the details. Then again, neither is the mother, whose name is Sam (Alanna Ubach) and who is visibly uncomfortable as soon she comes out of her dark house in the twilight to greet her daughter—with an awkward embrace that simultaneously feels as if it lasts too long and much too shortly within this context—after so many years.

What is there to say about the details, after all? Sam was an addict and, as Emily mentions at one point, had even enlisted her daughter to steal her drug of choice from a local clinic. The last straw, perhaps, was when Emily realized her mother didn't care enough about her to even notice that the daughter was using some of those stolen drugs, too.

Sam wants to try to put all that behind them. One of her friends died recently, after getting her own addiction led to her becoming involved with a local gang, and Sam realized that easily could have been her. It's probably not the most uneasy family Thanksgiving get-together in history, of course, and the mother suggests that Emily and Danny should come by her work the next day so that they can see how she has put her life together after getting sober.

The plot really begins when the two filmmakers show up at Sam's work, a group of charities that help with addiction and homelessness and other issues, but Sam isn't there. Her boss Ana (Krisha Fairchild) hasn't heard from Sam, and as time passes and Emily starts talking to more people who know or know of her mother, she starts to worry that Sam's fears about becoming involved in some bad business have come to pass.

All of this is quite convincing, in part on account of the naturalistic performances, which don't give away anything beyond the moment-to-moment realities for these characters, and mostly because the script lays out its puzzle so plainly—or, at least, it seems to do so. Emily and Danny piece together clues—a photograph of Sam with her friends that was strangely burnt at her house, what those friends and the people whom the mother helps at the charity know or don't know about her recent dealings, the severed head of a pig in the filmmakers' motel room that points directly at that local gang—and follow the requisite leads, straight toward the likelihood that Sam is or is about to be in some real danger.

Throughout, Westfall and Kos make the backdrop about people on the fringes—those at the shelter where Sam works, news stories about migrants disappearing or being killed along the border, even Emily, whose life story we basically can gather, and Danny, who has escaped a criminal past and worries that it will come back to haunt him now, themselves. Unlike a lot of gimmicky faux documentaries that have other ideas in mind, Kos' approach might have fooled us that this is the real deal (Surely, his background of making actual documentaries until this narrative debut has a lot to do with that).

Sure, much of this setup doesn't mean much to the final revelations of In Our Blood, which takes the story in an entirely different direction. The film shows itself to be such a clever bit of sleight-of-hand trickery, though, that the finale is a genuine shock, while the surprise itself displays how skillfully presented everything up until that point is.

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