Earth and Blood is an efficient French-language thriller on Netflix that tells the story of Said, the owner of a sawmill where one of his apprentices stores cocaine that his brother stole. The action ramps up when the drug dealer comes looking for his drugs.
The most impressive aspects to this film is the atmosphere that Julien Leclercq and Cinematographer Brecht Goyvaerts manages to evoke. We start with the raid to get the drugs that have been impounded by the police during a heavy rainstorm, and after it has finished we are left with this damp mist still hanging about the sawmill. Most of the film takes place at the sawmill and it is a good location well evoked – I could smell the damp wood.
How the plot unfolds is certainly not new – the main character using the scenery that he knows so well to his advantage to start killing the drug lord’s henchman one by one has been seen multiple times. It has the nasty violence and blood that this genre requires.
It is 80 minutes long so there isn’t that much time for subplots. They try a little, for example, Said selling the sawmill due to his health but it never really tries to make anything of it – if feels like they are there so the film isn’t even shorter. It doesn’t add any pathos to it.
Much of the reviews on IMDB are unkind to this film, and I hadn’t heard anything about it prior to watching it but for what it is, it is a fairly well executed genre movie that does exactly what it says on the tin.
For Streaming Out Loud! 