Watching Blood Dried Hands I kept getting the feeling it just wanted to be something else. You’ve seen it before – hell, they’ve parodied it on Saturday Night Live – a small town detective, haunted by her own past traumas and failures, hunts down a reluctant but very prolific serial killer, playing a weird cat-and-mouse game until all is revealed. The director’s cut of Blood Dried Hands wants to be a 3-4 episode series on a streaming service, and at two and a half hours does not have the story or the power to endure as a feature of that length. Despite strong moments from the performers, one cannot escape feeling that we are watching Silence of the Lambs fan fiction: missing girl, female detective, a serial killer, an imprisoned serial killer serving as mentor as the clock is raced to get the missing girl before she is killed, down to the confrontation between country lady cop and the killer as he stands over the missing girl. The third act even briefly becomes an episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit as the killer, Hayden Carey (Chance Gibbs) is brought in for questioning due to circumstantial evidence yet Sgt. Investigator Edi Sharp (Micha Marie Stevens in a solid performance) goes full Detective Benson on him, then gives an extended monologue about how the problem with the legal system is that criminal’s rights are more respected than victims. I kept waiting for the “doink doink” noise.

Debut writer/director Jason Vandygriff plays Finley Rawls, the Hannibal Lecter of this film – a strange and accomplished murderer whom Sgt. Sharp must visit in his cell to learn about how to catch serial killers, despite catching him. Finley has a ten-minute monologue about how and why he killed that little girl, which gives Vandygriff a lovely scene to play, but it neither advances the plot nor reveals his character in a manner that makes the character more interesting. Part of the pleasure of Lecter (at least initially) was how little we knew about him – how alien he truly was. This moment of the film is fairly standard for this film, however. Virtually every character gets a long, dramatic monologue – Sgt. Sharp gets a few, her fellow law enforcement officers, her estranged husband, Hayden Carey, the victim he keeps in a dog cage all get to tell their story and their thoughts. Even the sheriff (Hank Slaughter), in the film for only a few minutes, spends most of them giving a lengthy monologue about how many years he’s been in law enforcement and how he was godfather to one of the victims and knew her for her entire life and here are some fond memories of her…

The result is a drawn-out, introspective thriller (at least in the director’s cut) that spends long periods of time not thrilling. There lurks within this film a much tighter, might more interesting cat-and-mouse game, but even then, there are two serial killers in this film and neither seems particularly threatening. Nor does Sgt. Sharp’s character arc feel that it needs 155 minutes to reach resolution.  Perhaps the festival cut, coming in at less than two hours makes for a better experience, but the director’s cut length felt unjustified by the story being told.

5 out of 10