How Not to Hide a Body: "Blood on Her Name" a familiar crime thriller strengthened by taut, compelling storytelling

Blood on Her Name (2020)

85 min.

Release Date: February 28, 2020 (Limited & VOD)

“Blood on Her Name” may sound like a standard revenge exploitationer, but closest in tone and sensibility to Jeremy Saulnier’s equally worthwhile “Blue Ruin,” it’s more fallibly human and unsparing than other films of its ilk. Writer-director Matthew Pope, who co-wrote the script with Don M. Thompson, impresses with his feature debut and treats audiences with a level of respect. Dropping us right into the aftermath of manslaughter, this wiry, taut and grimy down-home crime thriller leaves it to the viewer to fill in the gaps, understanding how and why this cycle of violence began in the first place and could end with bleak consequences for all involved.

When we first meet Leigh Tiller (Bethany Anne Lind), the ex-wife of a convict who used to deal in shady business, she has cuts on her face and a dead body in the garage of the auto-body shop she owns in a sleepy Georgia town. It might have been an act of self-defense, but she panics and gets rid of all evidence before almost dumping the body in a lake. After realizing the attacker had a family from a voicemail left on his cellphone, Leigh decides to deliver the tarp-wrapped body to the family’s garage for them to find. Even as she tries to put this crime behind her, Leigh still has to contend with her hardscrabble life, protecting her troubled son (Jared Ivers) and dealing with her rocky relationship with her sheriff father (Will Patton). Complication upon complication arises as Leigh tries to stay on top of erasing all traces, like swiping security footage from that night and finding her missing necklace, and take care of this mess all on her own. 

Without needlessly re-staging the events of the fateful night many times over, "Blood on Her Name" shrewdly presses forward and builds steady tension out of what will happen from there. We know whodunit, but it’s the “why?” and the “what now?” that viewers will be involved in and want to figure out. Bethany Anne Lind (TV’s “Ozark”), a dead ringer for Rebecca Hall, does compelling, grueling work as Leigh. Leigh is actually a decent person and just trying desperately to survive, but it’s her guilt-ridden conscience that dooms her. A flashback to a young Leigh waiting in her father's police car and hearing gun shots inside a house also efficiently conveys her decision-making for the cover-up. Without a starter kit on how to clean up a crime, Leigh is unskilled and out of her league, two flawed qualities that make her more relatable than the Black Widows and Lorraine Broughtons of the world. Besides Lind, director Matthew Pope also pulls solid performances out of Will Patton, as Leigh’s estranged sheriff father whose corruption must be hereditary, and a de-glammed Elisabeth Röhm, who’s magnetic as the dead man's girlfriend. If “Blood on Her Name” feels awfully familiar as crime thrillers with a backwoods milieu go, it’s the level of unfussy storytelling coupled with skillful shoestring filmmaking that makes Matthew Pope’s first feature worth seeing.

Grade: B -