2022, Brad Anderson (Session 9) -- Netflix
A mother will do anything for their child. Except, apparently, do what's best. Jess (Michelle Monaghan, Source Code) is a mom barely holding onto the full custody of her children after the breakup of her marriage due to Jess's addiction and anger issues. She is desperate to prove to them, to the court and to herself that she can take care of the kids. But she's not doing so well, as she has to move them out to "the country", to what must be her grandparents' house.
Then the family dog goes missing. Then the dog returns all blood covered and glowing eyed. He bites Owen (Finlay Wojtak-Hissong, Dreamkatcher), on the neck, before Jess can kill the dog with a heavy water bowl. Owen recovers but is caught slurping from his plasma bag. Soon after Jess realizes the boy needs blood to survive and, as a nurse, makes some ... challenging choices, first collecting blood from the hospital lockers, then herself, and then... well, you know how these movies go.
There could have been something here, but the movie spent pretty much all of its two hours focused on just-OK mom making terrible-mom choices. It introduced, and even highlighted in the trailers, a creepy AF tree, in a dried up lake, surrounded by dead things, and even makes a feeble attempt to tie the vampirism to the tree, but... does nothing with it. Even the vampire nature is distilled down to just a blood addiction, which if not carrying with it some actual scary monster vibes, could have been investigated, even by just mom, as a contagion or virus or ... something. Instead, she just keeps on finding other ways to get blood for the vacant eyed little fucker until it becomes impossible to continue, and then... makes the worst choice. Even as a terrible metaphor for terrible parenting, I just didn't care. I also didn't care that the movie thought it would get a sequel implied by a "oooo something is still out there" post-credits coda.
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