In A Cold Vein opens, not unlike Brock Bodell’s Hellcat (2025), in medias res, with its protagonist, as disoriented as the viewer, regaining consciousness in the back of a moving vehicle. Even though Dean O’Reilly (Evan Gamble) has no idea why, or to whom, he is a prisoner, or how on earth he can possibly get out of this predicament when his hands and legs are bound with gaffer tape, from the moment he overhears that his 9-year-old son Jack (Griffon Ethridge) has also been taken from their home to a different location, he will do anything to stay alive, rescue his beloved Jack, and return to his wife Darla (Mor Cohen) – if she is still alive.
“This fucking guy won’t quit,” complains Steve (P. Michael Hayes II) to his associate Phil (Brian Villalobos). They are hired killers, brought in from out of town to pick up and bury Dean – but he, despite having been heavily drugged and several times enduring blunt force trauma to the head from a large wrench wielded by one of his captors, will not stay down. Dean is in fact a professional criminal, and warns Steve and Phil that his brother and boss Bruce (Cliff Dean) will be ‘relentless’ in hunting them down should anything happen to little Jack – but they do not listen, and despite their brutality, botch their job, leaving the injured Dean to go on his own vengeful rampage through the night while trying to piece together, along with us, what on earth is going on.
This second feature from writer/director/composer Eric Owen (Thirst, 2023) starts as it means to go on. For much as the key event (the abduction of Dean from his own home) has already taken place before the opening scene, violence is often elided here, shown in its aftermath rather than its enactment – while sporadic flashbacks suggest that what has so far been left to Dean’s and our imagination was not in fact quite as imagined. It is a game of cinematic peekaboo, playing upon different perceptions – and a real, palpable tension is generated in several sequences where Dean hides in the shadows and his emergence, though entirely expected, is long deferred.
In A Cold Vein is both road movie and Texan neo noir, as the desperate Dean, in his violent collision with other men of the night – including trucker Chuck (Steve Brudniak), the hitmen’s handler Marco (Marc Pouhé) and his IBS-afflicted assistant Tony (Eric Owen) – proves all at once champ and chump in a scheme that he does not fully understand, so that his race to save his family will also force him to face some difficult home truths, before landing upon a messily fitting revenge. The key reference point here is the Coen brothers’ debut Blood SImple (1984), but this low-budget chase in the dark travels back and forth along its own low-key trajectory.
In A Cold Vein had its world première at FrightFest, Friday 22nd August
