Marie (Susanne Wolff) has seriously hit the skids; her once successful comic career is up in flames due to her creative spark being extinguished and now she lives a completely drunken existence among the whores of Amsterdam’s Red Light District.
As you can imagine, her life is one conflict after another as she starts shit in every liquor store and dive in town, and before long she takes to stealing from her neighbor. One problem with that, this causes a horrific spiral that our fucked-up heroine may not be able to survive!
Look, we’ve all seen the “drunk in over their head in the horror biz” trope before, and in that Bloody Marie doesn’t seek to reinvent the wicked wheel… but that’s not to say this flick doesn’t have plenty of great shit (trust me, that’s a pro film critic term) to offer us!
Rather than focus on how dreadfully depressing Marie’s life has become, the focus remain firmly focused on the mystery at hand as our protagonist overhears all manner of grizzly goings-on through the paper thin walls of the apartment she calls home. All of this is accentuated by the limited locations the movie offers up that keeps the proceedings intimate, and therefore more relatable to the audience… in other words; it’s easy as fuckin’ pie to imagine ourselves in Marie’s shoes, which adds to the suspense, ya dig?
A lot of the heavy lifting here is done by Wolff, who acts the hell out of Lennert Hillege and Guido van Driel’s (both of which directed this picture as well) perfectly paced narrative. Marie could have easily slipped into the zone of the deplorable, but the chops of our leading lady make the character relatable… no easy feat believe you me!
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the near-Argento style lighting present in this picture. Things are bated in electric blue and hot pink, especially during the third act, which adds an other-worldly, surreal quality to the affair that presents a world just a little left of center than our own… a much appreciated fever-dream aesthetic among the ‘down n’ out’ grit at the story’s core.
To put a beastly bow on it; Bloody Marie is on off-kilter descent into a hooch-soaked semi-reality that is well worth visiting for lovers of bizarre-o cinema!
