Blood on Her Name movie review (2020)
“Blood on Her Name” tries to justify this by presenting several flashbacks featuring a young Leigh (Chandler Head) and Tiller. Seems her dad’s a corrupt cop, placing him firmly in the trenches of noir. Sometimes Leigh talks to her younger self, other times she walks into these flashbacks and observes. It’s a clunky device but these scenes are well shot and edited. Officer Tiller murdered a suspect in cold blood, then apparently disposed of the body. I assume that Leigh’s childhood concern that the victim’s family were left with no clue of his whereabouts contributed to her decision to hand deliver his corpse.
But noiristas like me gotta wonder: If your Dad’s corrupt, on the police force, and is adept at making bodies disappear, wouldn’t you call him if you were in the most dire of straits? He seems to be the only cop in town, too. We’re led to believe that her resistance stems from not wanting to figuratively sell her soul to the Devil, but considering her situation, Satan already has her soul on layaway.
One of the smarter things “Blood on Her Name” does is not re-stage the murder for us. All we see is the aftermath; the details are eventually filled in using dialogue. Of course, it turns out that this is a more complicated crime than we were first led to believe, and Pope and his co-writer Don M. Thompson add a protective, maternal dynamic to the proceedings that only works during the film’s climactic showdown between Leigh and Dani (Elisabeth Röhm), the wife of the slain man. Röhm and Lind are excellent in their scenes together, all of which stem from a missing piece of jewelry plot device lifted straight from Hitchcock’s “Frenzy.”
Of the male characters, Tiller is the only one who feels like he came with the neo-noir territory. Patton plays him with an unnerving menace mixed with crime-ridden common sense. Jimmy Gonzales is wasted as the clichéd minority whose sole existence is devoted to helping out the White lead, though at least he doesn’t get that character’s usual destiny and he has some chemistry with Ivers. “Blood on Her Name” is really onto something with Dani and Leigh’s Mama Bears protecting their cubs subplot, but by the time Leigh realizes she’s truly a chip off her Papa’s old block, too much frustration with her character had set in for me. Shakespeare said “conscience does make cowards of us all.” Here it just makes you a lousy crook.
