Writers and Directors: Matt Michalik and Rupert Evans
If watching a group of men knock the living daylights out of each other for 70 minutes, all filmed in black and white by dizzying handheld cameras, is your bag, then Bloodlust is for you. For the rest of us, perhaps not.
Receiving its world premiere in the Horror Strand at this year’s Raindance, Matt Michalik and Rupert Evans’ film is undeniably stylish, but with minimal plot, clunky dialogue and repetitive scenes, the violence – and there is a lot of it – comes across as gratuitous. And there are so many bare-knuckle punches that any suspense completely evaporates, and these endless skirmishes in an Australian forest soon become tiresome.
Set in a post-apocalyptic world, Bloodlust begins promisingly, however. Inventively, the backstory is relayed to the viewer by song, a clever way to deal with exposition. A young woman sings a kind of folk song to her boyfriend, its lyrics half-explaining how they met and how they survive. But her plaintive voice alerts a group of men in the forest who kill her brutally for reasons that are never explained.
The rest of Bloodlust, following the tried and tested narrative of the revenge film, is centred on our ‘hero’, Keith, who picks off the men one by one. The fight scenes are cleanly shot, and every thump is bone-shatteringly relayed to the audience through visceral sound. But there is no respite; it just goes on and on.
Ronald MacKinnon is fairly impenetrable as Keith, an unlikely superhero who absorbs every punch to the face and escapes every bullet fired. The rest of the actors don’t have such a good time of it, hastily drawn and encumbered by a poor script. The film might be more successful if these men were as silent as Keith.
Matt Michalik and Rupert Evans are certainly handy with a camera, but the rather one-note attitude of their film does them no favours. Nevertheless, there are flashes of brilliance and flashes of red that promise great things.
Bloodlust is screening at the Raindance Film Festival 2026 from 17-26 June.
