'Blood Cells' is a bad film for the animal-loving viewer: it starts with a cow being shot, continues through stories of live chicks being hurled into buckets and one of the last things to happen is a dog going missing.
But as for the humans... Adam is a young man when his dairy farmer father shoots himself following the officially-mandated slaughter of all his cattle - presumably as a result of one of the periodic foot-and-mouth or other disease outbreaks that afflict British livestock farming. Some years later Adam is working 'up North', passing his evenings involved in (rather fake-sounding) conversations in working men's clubs and getting pie-eyed at other people's birthday parties. But then he gets a telephone call: his brother is about to become a father and Adam is expected home for the birth.
And thus begins a road movie of sorts: Adam is reluctant to face his home-based personal demons and so takes an indirect route home, taking in Rhyl (where he gets drunk with two teenage girls), Birmingham (where a born-again Christian tries to save his soul) and London (where, in a bizarre and frankly jarring development, he ends up performing in a grotty sex club). All this misery is accompanied by what I take to be improvised conversations, and several shots of Adam staring into the middle distance.
With Adam being the sole constant in the film, he has to be played by an actor capable of holding the audience's attention for almost ninety minutes and Barry Ward is such an actor: his very subtle, unshowy performance ensures that although the viewer may not have much sympathy for Adam, s/he is quite prepared to follow him through the film. The overall feel of the film - both in storyline and staging - is bleak and washed-out; a date movie this definitely isn't! But as a character study of an unremarkable, ordinary man failing to deal with unresolved grief it works quite well.
But as for the humans... Adam is a young man when his dairy farmer father shoots himself following the officially-mandated slaughter of all his cattle - presumably as a result of one of the periodic foot-and-mouth or other disease outbreaks that afflict British livestock farming. Some years later Adam is working 'up North', passing his evenings involved in (rather fake-sounding) conversations in working men's clubs and getting pie-eyed at other people's birthday parties. But then he gets a telephone call: his brother is about to become a father and Adam is expected home for the birth.
And thus begins a road movie of sorts: Adam is reluctant to face his home-based personal demons and so takes an indirect route home, taking in Rhyl (where he gets drunk with two teenage girls), Birmingham (where a born-again Christian tries to save his soul) and London (where, in a bizarre and frankly jarring development, he ends up performing in a grotty sex club). All this misery is accompanied by what I take to be improvised conversations, and several shots of Adam staring into the middle distance.
With Adam being the sole constant in the film, he has to be played by an actor capable of holding the audience's attention for almost ninety minutes and Barry Ward is such an actor: his very subtle, unshowy performance ensures that although the viewer may not have much sympathy for Adam, s/he is quite prepared to follow him through the film. The overall feel of the film - both in storyline and staging - is bleak and washed-out; a date movie this definitely isn't! But as a character study of an unremarkable, ordinary man failing to deal with unresolved grief it works quite well.
