Kicking off with tearaway Bobbie (Britni Camacho) zooming across the New Mexico badlands in her vintage Ford back to her no-good boyfriend, this film rides a two-lane blacktop straight for the heart of classic Americana. British director Lawrence Jacomelli dons the appropriate outlaw squint for this cat-and-mouse thriller – one that’s capable of picking out a sharp composition, too – but ultimately his debut is too disjointed to hit top gear.
Ignoring her sister’s warnings about reconciling with her violent partner, Bobbie stops for petrol and brushes off the skeezy pestering of Sheriff Bilstein (John Schwab), but the purse-lipped lawman picks her up down the road for speeding and supposedly damaging his siren. They cut a deal for her to reimburse him for the damage – and our suspicions that something dodgy is going down are confirmed back at the gas station where she withdraws the money (the prologue in which Jacomelli shows us another girl being horribly murdered was another clue).
Bobbie’s backstory, as well as a long Thelma and Louise-ish interlude in which downtrodden waitress Amy (Sydney Brumfield) is in the passenger seat, frames Blood Star against an unbroken horizon of misogyny, with the sheriff looming as the next stop. But her pursuer’s initial machinations seem as playful as they are threatening, and somehow this menace doesn’t hang as heavily as it should. The charismatic Camacho, flipping coins on her knuckles, often strikes a note of insouciance that annuls the tension.
The final lurch into horror territory doesn’t so much bolster the misogyny theme as lance it of all remaining venom by rendering it cartoonish. Jacomelli has an undeniable eye for compacting a pulpy morass into snappy imagery, such as a closeup of the sheriff’s loathsome kisser as he chomps chicken wings, or the neat transition between scattered scrapyard cars and a box of hijacked mobile phones. But Blood Star doesn’t nail the balance between iconography and inner feeling.
• Blood Star is on digital platforms from 7 October.
