BLISS offers an interesting easter egg hunt for people who watched direct to video horror films from the late 90s like I did. Is this really a current film? Other than the modern use of the word “hipster“ as an insult and a sex scene that would‘ve probably been more restrained in 1998, there are no indications that the film wasn‘t made in the last century. This ambiguity is probably purposeful, since Joe Begos shot the film on super 16 with all of its quirks. The scenes play out in a few living spaces, bars, and clubs filled with people wearing leather and sunglasses and scenes with painter Dezzy (Dora Madison, DEXTER) driving along the L.A. highway in her vintage cabrio. Everything is lit with strong colours or shot with a color filter, and every interior is either floodlighted or filled will ominous shadows. Dezzy leaves her reality behind in these places, the reality of her painter‘s block and looming homelessness. She experiences increasingly extreme fragments of a hellish trip between her blackouts after taking a new super drug. Her waking phases soon turn very bloody, but she does finish a painting during her blackouts. The painting shows an image of infernal glory, but it‘s very likely that she will have to pay a price for the inspiration. You have to go along with the topic, aesthetic, and narrative style, but it‘s clear even before the homage to Raimi‘s EVIL DEAD that the team behind the film has a lot of love for old B-movies from the late VHS days as they have reproduced it in the most irony-free way possible. Because of this it is honest and not just an embarrassing imitation.

Christian Klose

Translation: Elinor Lewy