Hi everyone!
Can you feel that? Lots of Oscars discussion, rising in a crescendo, as everyone gets ready for the ceremony tomorrow? No matter what happens, I think we can all take comfort in the fact that no one will be happy. Unless there’s a win for “Roma” (Episode #352), because damn. But for today, we have another Netflix Original from Spain, this time a drama. For a few other Spanish Netflix Originals, check out Shane Hyde’s review for “Ánimas” (Episode #405), and my reviews for “Solo” (Episode #384) and “When Angels Sleep” (Episode #364). And if you have any favorites, let us know over social media.
And now...
Today’s movie is “The Tree of Blood” (2018), the Netflix Original Spanish drama written and directed by Julio Medem. The film follows Rebeca (Úrsula Corberó) and Marc (Álvaro Cervantes), a married couple struggling with their relationship, that decide to travel to Rebeca’s grandparents house in Basque Country to write about their families. Their exercise transports them back twenty-five years ago, and brings to light forgotten and hidden truths about their families and themselves.
No spoilers!
I have found I can describe “The Tree of Blood” in one of two ways. First, it’s like someone took the meandering and jarring plot of an American soap opera and reformatted it for the silver screen in Spain. Successful writers, forgotten histories, organized crime, horrific unveilings, incredibly convenient coincidences. It’s all there, but this film also adds a great deal of sex, bringing me to the second way to describe this film, which is if someone tried to take seriously the weirdly pervasive genre of stepfamily pornography by adding a well-financed film plot around it. And the only one who seems to suffer is the viewer.
“The Tree of Blood” opens innocently enough, with a married couple deciding to write the entangled stories of their families, as a means of uncovering the truths and lies within their own relationship. The premise is sound enough, and I have to admit, I really liked the method used to tell the story. Sets are reused to tell the stories, and sometimes to tell stories from multiple timeframes at once, watching the present married couple watching their parents and grandparents act out key moments in their shared story. More often than not, these scenes are well-framed and add to the complicated story being told. However, the film is also obsessed with the complicated sexual habits of its characters, which either get in the way, or tarnish, the more artistic aims of the storytelling technique.
And if it’s not their sexual habits, it’s yet another bombshell revelation, each one lessening the impact of the next. The gaps between the bombshells, when they aren’t filled with sex, are filled with the actors standing around naked, or engaging in bad dialogue often about sex, or making metaphors about bulls and cows. The film also has the weirdest suicide I’ve ever seen on film. The same cycle repeats, over and over again, until we reach a wholly unsatisfying ending, with zero consequences for just about everyone involved. The cast does the best they can with the material, but ultimately there just isn’t enough solid story to enjoy.
“The Tree of Blood” (2018) is a soap opera story about a privileged, weirdly intermingled pair of families, as told through a struggling married couple writing their collective memoirs. While it has a good premise and an interesting story technique, the almost incessant focus on sex ends up drowning out the overly complex story that unfolds. Soap opera fans might be interested in this film, but everyone else can probably give it a hard pass.
Rotten Tomatoes: 60%
Metacritic: NR
One Movie Punch: 5.2/10
“The Tree of Blood” (2018) is rated TV-MAand is currently playing on Netflix.
