A journalist desperately tries to find his missing fiancee and finally uncover the truth behind a sinister folklore, leading him down a dangerous road of discovery.

Blood Myth (2019) tells the story of James (Jonathan McClean), a journalist demoted at work, looking for the next story that will bring back sense to his job. A day like any other, James gets a haircut, despite being bald, and the hairdresser tells him an urban legend known as “Thirty” to the townspeople of a remote rural village where every 30 years a person from around disappears. James decides to ask his boss, also known as his ex-lover, to allow him to go investigate the story since during that weekend the three decades would have elapsed since the last disappearance. Her boss authorizes it, and even allows him to take his fiancée whom is eight months-and-a-half pregnant. Upon arriving to the village, they settle in an inn and, after spending a night, James’s pregnant fiancée mysteriously disappears. Was she vanished by spirit that takes a soul every 30 years or did someone want to hurt James’s fiancée?

First of all, who takes a woman near her due date to a work trip in which life is endangered? Who thought that this plot would make sense? The idea of ​​following the lead of an urban legend and its disappearances isn’t bad. However, during the development of the film, it only remains as an idea. You never see a true outcome linked to the central idea of ​​this project.

The main idea, as mentioned before, is not bad. The problem with Blood Myth is that it takes its role as a horror movie seriously without having a degree of suspense or issues that cause psychological fears. Despite having a story that makes no sense, the thread is never lost until the end when the absence of motives affects the outcome.

At first, the film promised a lot, from an introduction in which the pessimistic life that the journalist leads is exposed to the moment that makes him see a glimpse of light disguised as hope. The sad thing is that the introduction was also disguised as hope. After the opening sequence, the development is carried out as slowly as possible with many filler shots that make the film more pretentious than it wants to be. By the time the journalist begins to connect the points of his fiancée’s disappearance, the film returns to speed but, by that time, it seems too late to recover the viewer’s attention.

It is a low budget film so it does not have many effects that make it stand out over other movies with paranormal themes. However, the fact that the story has a rural area as a background helps a lot; it sets into a civilization that still lives under basic beliefs, and perhaps secularized, far from modern society. What does not help is the bipolar performance of the actor who plays James. The character is sarcastic, moody and a little apathetic about his work issues, but it makes no sense to go from cold to warm, not even hot because he can’t be bothered about it, in a matter of seconds; and always keeping the standard as frozen.

Blood Myth can be considered an unsolved mystery for its lack of horror and broken plotted baseline. It runs with “You’ll never get them back” as their tagline which, in this case, could be about the minutes you will not get back from watching filler scenes that are somehow artistic presenting its studied cinematography but it ends up being what it is: a plain and giant filler.