Sundance review: 'Blood' is a meandering misfire, beautifully rendered but with no particular place to go

Pleasant but meandering, writer-director Bradley Rust Gray’s “Blood” shows there’s a thin line between a movie that’s meditative and a movie that stubbornly refuses to get to the point.

On paper, the premise is fairly straightforward: Chloe (played by the great Swiss-born actress Carla Juri) is a photographer in Japan on an assignment, apparently for a food publication. She’s also recently widowed, and the film frequently flashes to better days she had with her husband, Peter (Gustav Skarsgård, another son of Stellan).

When Chloe isn’t soaking up Tokyo food culture, or taking dance classes from a Japanese friend, she hangs out with a musician, Toshi (played by the musician Takashi Ueno), who has been friends with Chloe and Peter for years. Toshi has a little girl, Futaba (played by Futaba Okazaki), with Down syndrome, and Chloe dotes on her nearly as much as Toshi does.

About midway through this nearly two-hour film, Toshi asks the question the audience has been waiting to hear: “What do you think about going on a date?”

The question is intended to nudge Chloe into some sort of decision, to reflect on whether she has healed enough after Peter’s death to think about finding love again. It’s a simple dramatic premise, something any Hallmark Channel hack could unravel in short order.

Gray — who makes movies with his wife, So Yong Kim (who directed Gray’s scripts for “Lovesong” and “In Between Days,” both past Sundance entries) — is after something else, though it’s difficult to divine exactly what. Some scenes have Chloe conversing with an older friend (Issei Ogata, from Martin Scorsese’s “Silence”) about loneliness. Others have Chloe in a dance class run by another friend (Cheiko Ito), a choreographer fascinated with mirrors as a metaphor for the pull of one’s soulmate.

These are some nice ideas, but Gray is in no great hurry to go anywhere with them. He’s content to have these characters explore Tokyo, which is beautifully rendered by cinematographer Eric Lin (“Hearts Beat Loud”). Where Chloe could have catharsis, instead we get stasis — but it’s a pretty limbo, populated by characters you hope eventually will figure it out.

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‘Blood’

★★1/2

Premiered Monday, January 24, in the U.S. Dramatic competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again on the festival portal, Wednesday, January 26, for a 24-hour window starting at 8 a.m. Not rated, but probably R for one sex scene. Running time: 112 minutes; in English, and Japanese with subtitles.