Products You May Like
Horror trains you to watch the corners. Check the dark, check behind the door, check what the frame is not showing you. Blood Shine takes that habit away almost immediately, because everything terrible in it happens where you can see.
Emily Bennett and Justin Brooks, who previously worked together on Alone with You, have made a folk horror movie about a woman who worships light. Bennett plays Clara, alone in rural upstate New York, running a private religion out of sunlight and ritual and escalating physical cost. David Call plays Brighton West, a horror director who comes north to finish a screenplay and ends up as raw material for somebody else’s faith.
That is the setup. What Bennett and Brooks do with it is more interesting than the logline suggests, at least until the movie starts repeating itself.
Bennett Is the Reason This Works
Clara could have been a stock zealot. The script gives her every opportunity to be one, and Bennett declines.
What she plays instead is conviction without any doubt underneath it, which turns out to be much worse to sit with. Clara is not performing belief or working herself up to it. She has arrived at it, completely, and she is generous about it. There is a tenderness in the performance that keeps colliding with what her hands are actually doing, and that collision is where most of the movie’s real horror comes from.
It helps enormously that her worship is solitary. Cult horror usually leans on the crowd, the chanting, the group turning as one. Larry Fessenden turns up as the leader whose teaching shaped her, and Brendan Sexton III and Toby Poser fill out the world, but Clara mostly practices alone. One person, absolutely certain, with nobody to answer to. That is a scarier proposition than a room full of robes.
The visual thinking backs her up. Sunlight in this movie is not comfort. It exposes, it bleaches, it finds you. The upstate landscape is genuinely beautiful and the film keeps putting blood and dirt and bare skin directly in the middle of it, so the prettiness never gets to be a break. Bennett and Brooks have real confidence about where to point a camera, and the flesh-and-punishment material lands hard because the frame refuses to look away or dim the lights for you.
Brighton, meanwhile, is not somebody you will want to rescue. He is arrogant, he treats women badly, he is a mess with drugs, and he has built a career on filming other people’s suffering. Watching a man like that get caught by someone whose cruelty operates on a completely different scale is a genuinely uncomfortable moral problem, and the film is smart enough to know it.
Where It Loses the Thread
The middle drags. There is no polite way around it.
Clara’s rituals start to feel like variations rather than escalations, and the symbolism keeps restating a point the movie made cleanly in its first act. Blood Shine has faith, control, misogyny, addiction, the exploitation baked into horror filmmaking, bodily transformation, and the idea that pain can buy transcendence all sitting on the table at once. Having ideas and building an argument out of them are separate jobs, and the second one only gets done in patches.
The Brighton-as-filmmaker angle is the clearest casualty. Voyeurism, artistic ego, an industry that chews people up, all of it gets raised and very little of it gets pressure applied. It feels like a draft away from something.
The ending has split people, and I understand both camps. There are strong images in it and a real attempt at catharsis. There is also more on the table by that point than any conclusion was going to clear.
Still, this is the kind of independent horror worth showing up for. Bennett gives a performance that will follow you out of the theater, and the film’s argument about light is executed with more nerve than a lot of bigger movies manage all year. Bring patience for the middle stretch. What surrounds it earns the trouble.
3.5 out of 5.
Blood Shine is in select theaters and available digitally from Dark Sky Films as of August 21, 2026.