"BLOOD DAUGHTER"

In "Blood Daughter," director Bryan Enk transforms the myth of Dracula into something stranger, more fractured, and more psychologically volatile than we’ve seen before. This is not just a retelling of Bram Stoker’s novel—it’s a self-aware haunting, a fever dream stitched from memory, mythology, and the burdens passed between generations.

At its core, "Blood Daughter" is about inheritance, not just of blood, but of identity, trauma, and unfinished stories. Abby, the titular daughter, is no ordinary offspring of horror royalty. She is a vessel of conflicting histories—literary, cinematic, familial—trapped within a gothic architecture that feels more psychological than physical. The tower where she’s kept is less a prison and more a metaphor for inherited trauma: a place where the past loops endlessly, whispering through walls, refracting through old faces, resurrecting roles that no longer belong to anyone truly living.

Enk plays with the language of legacy in radical, fragmented ways. There are characters who age and return, others who echo through time, and voices—so many voices—that seem to multiply like the film’s own identities. "Blood Daughter" doesn’t just blur the line between past and present—it erases it, smearing one across the other in a way that’s dizzying, often unsettling. Dialogue loops, characters fold in on themselves, and even the actress playing Abby enters the story as herself, a moment that veers into metatextual madness.

But what makes the film so unsettling is the way it grapples with agency, particularly Abby’s. She is the product of a lineage she never chose, born from a story already written, and yet she aches to rewrite it. Her identity is fractured across timelines, reflections, and projections, as if the act of becoming one’s own person is itself a monstrous rebellion.

There are moments of absurdity, even theatricality—song and dance, abrupt tonal shifts—but beneath the chaos lies a piercing clarity: "Blood Daughter" understands how deeply horror is tied to the fear of becoming what came before. Dracula, once the symbol of seductive monstrosity, here becomes a figure of oppressive memory—less predator than prisoner of his own myth.

"Blood Daughter" is a séance with the past. A looping chant for release. And a chilling reminder that sometimes, the scariest thing we inherit isn’t blood—it’s the story we’re forced to live inside.

7/10