Blood and Carpet (2015)

directed by Graham Fletcher-Cook
UK
72 minutes
4 stars out of 5
----

So this movie is about a couple who commit a murder in late 1960s England and have to deal with the dirty work of disposing with the body. Unfortunately- considering that this was the main draw for me- the story doesn't only follow the process of covering up the murder, but also covers marital disputes between the couple as well as their nosy "friend" and the wife's general dissatisfaction with life. All while they happen to have a body stashed in their bathroom.

It's very bare of set pieces or anything to embellish the visuals aside from some nice costuming and being shot in black-and-white, but this still feels novel despite the plethora of late-60s period pieces cropping up lately. It feels much, much more like a classic English play than a regular old movie; definitely don't go into this expecting schlock or anything less than actors putting in 110% despite the ordinariness of their surroundings. This is why I liken it to a play rather than a traditional movie: People acting the hell out of their script in a sparse, non-showy background.

Because of the divergence from the meat and potatoes of a conventional murder film, there's some stuff that doesn't feel satisfyingly resolved and some questions I wanted answered that weren't. If it's ever stated who the first body is in the beginning, I didn't catch it. I thought more than once that the characters were going to kill somebody and then the two narratives would join, because it looks like multiple different points in this film could plausibly match up to one another and ultimately lead to an explanation for why there's a body in the bathroom at the very beginning, but that body is consistently mentioned throughout the film, so nothing in it could truly have taken place prior to the events of the opening scenes.

I actually feel a little embarrassed for being confused by a modest 72-minute crime flick with a £3000 (about $4,060, less than rent for some studios in Manhattan) budget in which we know who the killers are and there's basically only two or three truly important characters. But I guess that could be seen as a good thing. I wasn't confused due to inept writing, it's just that even though it's lacking visually, this still manages to pack in a lot of angles that don't reveal themselves to a viewer all at once. It is also remarkably good at casting actresses who resembled the main actress for those shots of her as a child and an elderly woman. I want to wrap up this review so I'm going to stop talking now, but I wanted to mention that that final shot of the protagonist as an old woman was brilliant for many reasons, but largely because it gave us a connection to our time, it let us look at her as somebody whose story still existed in the present day after we had been contextualizing her throughout the whole movie as somebody belonging to a time firmly in the past.