Fantastic Fest 2019 review: Joe Begos’ BLISS is a drug-fuelled, hallucinatory look at addiction and creativity (with vampires)

Writer/director Joe Begos (The Mind’s Eye, Almost Human) is here to save the vampire movie. While the genre has been watered-down with sparkling YA adaptations over the years, Begos’ Bliss reclaims the true horror at the heart of the genre with a lean and exhilarating film filled with drugs, sex, and a seemingly endless supply of blood and gore, one that also serves as a meditation on creativity and inspiration.

Bliss centers on a young LA painter named Dezy (Dora Madison). Dropped by her agent, Dezy is struggling to complete her next work, but can’t seem to find the inspiration for her piece. Between avoiding her landlord who’s threatening her with eviction and cruising around LA, Dezy hits up her dealer (Graham Skipper) who turns her onto a new drug called bliss. After doing her fair share, Dezy ends up at a local punk show for a debaucherous night that includes a threesome with her friend Courtney (Tru Collins) and Ronnie (Rhys Wakefield), and plenty of drinking and snorting. When she wakes up the next day, she is suddenly inspired, throwing herself into her work, which begins taking on a hellish tone as she wildly progresses in a trance-like state.

Begos shoots the drug scenes with a kinetic style that makes you feel like you’ve mainlined Dezy’s madness directly into your forehead. He liberally employs the use of incessant strobes (there is even a warning before the film starts), and blankets the scenes in red lighting, creating a claustrophobic and seedy look that goes hand in hand with the dive bars and industrial lofts that Dezy moves through. That hallucinatory style gets increasingly more chaotic and intense once Dezy is bitten by a vampire, with her newfound blood lust and drug cravings converging into a feverish desire that also spurs her creatively, unlocking darker depths of her art as the bodies start piling up and her life spirals further out of control.

Dora Madison’s anguished portrayal of Dezy lends Bliss a real sense of authenticity; she seems like someone you could easily bump into at a local punk or metal bar, which makes her transformation into a blood-hungry creature that much more unsettling to watch. Alongside the blinding lights and raucous soundtrack, the film is filled with practical gore effects that lend the film a timeless quality. Bliss truly feels like something that would have screened in grindhouses in the 70s, without ever coming across as simply an exercise in nostalgia. Begos has tapped into something primal about the intersection between addiction and creation, and how they (literally in this case) feed off of each other.

Beautifully shot on film, Bliss reveals a side of LA we rarely see in films anymore, a dark underbelly of people scraping by in the margins that have nothing in common with the glamour and wealth co-existing in the same city. With a riveting lead performance and an all-out audio & visual attack that’s sure to get your heartbeat racing, Bliss violently yanks the vampire genre back down into the grimy, bloody depths where it belongs.

Bliss is in select theatres and VOD on September 27.