Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Trying to piece together family histories is pretty complicated and wrought in real life. When you add dramatic complications that a movie screenplay brings into the mix, things can get awfully complex. The Tree Of Blood, which debuted earlier this month on Netflix, challenges viewers to piece together the interconnected lives of two young lovers as they write down their history. Does it make for interesting drama or a confusing slog?
THE TREE OF BLOOD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: The ins and outs of The Tree of Blood are hard to summarize, so we’re just going to tease the basics. Rebeca (Úrsula Corberó) and Marc (Álvaro Cervantes), a young couple deeply in love with each other, drive up to a farm in Basque country, hug the large tree in front of the farmhouse, and go in to write down their shared family history. The farm belongs to Amaia (Patricia López Arnaiz), an acclaimed author both of them know, but it hasn’t been used since her father died. But when Rebeca looks around, she sees visions of people that were there before. “This place is alive!” she exclaims.
So as they go back and forth on their family histories, we see most of it in flashbacks: Marc’s mother Nuria (Lucia Delgado as the young Nuria, Maria Molins as middle-aged Nuria) is shuttled away from her villa soon after her parents die in a suspicious car accident. The person who saves her is family bodyguard Olmo (Joaquín Furriel), who tells her that the Georgian mafia is coming to take over the house. He then has sex with her in a lagoon and disappears.
Rebeca talks about how her mother Macarena (Najwa Nimri) was a rock star — “La Maca” — but quit after giving birth and seeing Rebeca going under the knife for life-saving surgeries as a baby. Macarena runs into a “fan” named Victor (Daniel Grao), and they fall for each other. But Macarena hears a voice in her head that drives her slowly mad, to the point where she commits herself to a mental health facility. So Victor raises Rebeca as his own for six years, until Macarena finally comes home. They eventually marry.
Nuria becomes “very close” friends with Amaia, and also becomes her editor. Then Amaia meets Olmo, and they fall for each other. This is where Marc and Rebeca meet, because Olmo and Victor are brothers, and the future couple meet each other at Olmo and Amaia’s wedding, when they are 14.
As Marc and Rebeca write more about their families, they find that they’re even more intertwined than they first realize, which leads to the two of them splitting up. But then, individually, they find out even more about each other than they bargained for, especially the ties both Olmo and Victor have to the Russian mafia, as their family moved to Russia for a generation or two before coming back to Spain.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It’s a bit goofier version of other movies that reveal family secrets, like Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies.
Performance Worth Watching: Arnaiz plays Amaia as the font of sanity in a family that, as we see, becomes more insane as we peel away the layers. Even though she’s the passionate artist, she’s also very forthright and practical, and doesn’t seem very comfortable with lying to people she loves. And Arnaiz’s performance shows just how assured Amaia is amidst the madness.
Memorable Dialogue: “I stood behind you after your operation. We lived together for two years. You can’t leave me like this. Why? Because I chose to tell you the truth? A truth that is… old!” Rebeca yells to Marc after some of what’s revealed is too much for him and he decides to leave.
Single Best Shot: When Marc and Rebeca have their first snog, a cow falls out of a tree. How did it get there? A major windstorm. What does it mean? Who the hell knows?
Sex and Skin: Every couple in this film has sex as seen through a close-up, close to fish-eye perspective. And there is plenty of skin, male and female. Also lots of skin where people are just standing or sitting and not necessarily being sexy.
Our Take: The Tree of Blood (original title: El árbol de la sangre) is convoluted, a bit affected, and it’s hard to keep track of who’s who and who they’re related to. It also feels like it’s about 30 minutes too long.
But, for some reason, we got sucked into the story of how this young couple, who just look like hipsters trying to get back to nature in the film’s first scenes, are interconnected.
Our introduction into this story, with Marc and Rebeca pithily taking turns writing parts of their story, made us want to tear our hair out. But as the flashbacks increased (the color of the flashbacks were more saturated than from the present day, which is the opposite convention than what we usually see) and the pieces fell into place, our interest in these lovers’ shared history increased. We started caring a little less about them and more about the people in their lives, and then when the story came around to their involvement, we started caring more about Rebeca and Marc.
It’s sort of brilliant in a way; writer and director Julio Medem got us to care about his main characters through stories that didn’t really involve them, which led us to buy into some of the more eyerolling coincidences that happened when the two of them did enter the story.
Still, it was very hard to keep track of all the relationships, and whose grandparents belonged to who, and — most of all — whose role was what in the movie’s big reveal. We give Medem an A for effort on this one, but only a B for execution.
Our Call: STREAM IT. The Tree Of Blood is 138 minutes long, but doesn’t drag. As involved as you’ll get in the story, though, it takes a bit of mental energy to put all the pieces together.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.
