"We just wanted to be brave!" declares 15-year-old Emerson Grimm (Summer H. Howell) at a pivotal moment in Carly May Borgstrom's thriller Spirit in the Blood.
Being courageous is not merely lip service for Emerson and her friends — it may be their only hope for survival in a small community where a missing teenager's mangled dead body has been found. While community leaders such as Pastor Carl (Michael Wittenborn) are convinced the deceased girl was mauled by a mountain lion, Emerson believes something more sinister is afoot.
Ever since her parents moved back to her father's (Greg Bryk) highly religious childhood town, Emerson has been seeing things that no one else can, the most disturbing of which is a creature that chased her in the woods. The only person who seems to believe her is Delilah (Sarah-Maxine Racicot), the lone student at her new school who does not initially ostracize her.
Quickly becoming best friends and settling into their respective roles, Emerson being the brains and Delilah being the motivator/enabler, the pair decide to conduct an ancient ritual designed to protect them from the monster. According to one of Emerson's children's books, it was believed in some cultures that releasing the spirit encased within in one's blood enables fearlessness and great strength.
The catch, of course, is that a person cannot leave the spirit free for too long, as the lack of inhibition will lead it to destructive places.
As the town enters further down the mountain lion cave of paranoia, conducting vigorous prayer sessions when the men are not out in their hunting parties, other teenager girls (Sarah Abbott, Lyla Elliott, Ariadne Deibert) reveal to Emerson and Delilah their possible encounters with the monster as well. Realizing that they must take their safety into their own hands, and forming a coven of friendship in the process, they find themselves performing rituals, getting high, drinking beer and testing each other's physical strength. It's in these moments of rebellious sisterhood that Borgstrom's film feels most alive and effectively captures the sense of danger lurking around every corner for teenage girls.
Unfortunately, Borgstrom's tale of female empowerment in the face of patriarchy sinks in the quicksand of its own muddled ideas. Spirit in the Blood drops viewers into a religious community that it has no interest in truly exploring. The audience is told that Emerson's father's desire to return to his religious roots was spurred by the previous miscarriages his now-pregnant wife Anna (Michelle Monteith) endured. However, Anna has no other defining traits outside of her pregnancy. In fact, most of the women in the film are reduced to either being unwaveringly supportive of the men or are damaged drunkards like Delilah's mother Gracie (Kimberly-Sue Murray).
Even for the men (and perhaps especially so), the lack of shading for the thinly-sketched characters is apparent. Across the film, the men are one-note, falling into one of three categories: authoritarians like Pastor Carl, broken by grief like Julian, or calculating predators like Gracie's boyfriend Frank (Cory Lipman), who is also making moves on Delilah. While these archetypes reinforce the notion that it takes many arms to uphold the patriarchal structure, it waters down the overall sense of tension the film tries to build.
Viewers care little about a monster lurking in the woods when the horrors of the girls' daily life are equally menacing and left unaddressed. By reducing their environment to simple statements about the evils of patriarchy, Borgstrom inadvertently falls into a problematic and very myopic view of feminism.
For all its fist-pumping moments, Spirit in the Blood steps into the trap of finding strength off the backs of minorities — an occurrence that often plagues the white feminist movement. Despite being the one who supports Emerson from the early stages, and ultimately provides her with the literal tool that will help to slay the beast, it is Delilah, the lone person of colour in the all-white community, who is frequently thrown to the wolves in the script.
Never fully delving into Delilah's relationship with her mom or her mom's lecherous boyfriend, Borgstrom merely paints her as a damaged girl in desperate need to flee the community. However, when the pressure gets too hot for Emerson and the other girls, especially after tragedy strikes, Delilah's the one who they conveniently serve up as the sacrificial lamb for punishment. This sense of betrayal wouldn't be so egregious had Borgstrom not then put Delilah in a position to once again risk her life to help Emerson in the teen's time of need.
By attempting to shine a light on the daily horrors of a patriarchy that preys on young women, Spirit in the Blood inadvertently exposes its own shaky politics. Instead of being a truly chilling work, Borgstrom's film winds up being a cluttered thriller that has much to say but never puts its full spirit into actually saying it.