Books of Blood (2020)

Brannon Braga's Books of Blood arrives with a respectable pedigree, an adaptation of Clive Barker's horror anthology, and it conducts itself with the grim efficiency of a filmmaker who knows the assignment. Three stories tangle across space and time, bound by a wraparound about a psychic whose flesh becomes the page. The cast is notably multiethnic, with Freda Foh Shen, Yul Vazquez, Andy McQueen, Saad Siddiqui and Kenji Fitzgerald doing solid work. The film never remarks on this. Race is not a subject here, not a theme, not a glancing reference. These are simply working actors in a horror picture, which in 2020 reads as a choice, though not a statement.

The first segment follows Jenna, a college student whose sensory-processing condition makes certain noises unbearable. She stops taking her medication and runs. The film regards her condition with sympathy and then treats it as pathology, a thing to be escaped and later, in a closing twist of genuine cruelty, embraced. Two of the three segments orbit women, Jenna and the grieving Mary, but both are positioned as marks: manipulated, betrayed, paralyzed, mutilated. No argument is made on their behalf. The camera is interested in what can be done to a body, not in what a body means.

Money drifts through the proceedings, a bookseller's debt to shady lenders, Mary's need to raise funding for her work, and none of it coheres into a critique of anything larger. The body horror is thorough and committed, which places it at a distance from any contemporary conversation about accepting bodies as they are. And then there is the silence. No sermon. No moral. Braga has made a gory anthology that wants only to unsettle you, and it manages that without a single moment of instruction. In an era of cinema that cannot stop explaining itself, the restraint deserves a small, grudging nod.