- Directed by Jonathan Cuartas
- Written by Jonathan Cuartas
- Stars: Patrick Fugit, Ingrid Sophie Schram, Owen Campbell
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 30 Minutes
- Link: https://amzn.to/3ffWtuK
Synopsis
A man named Dwight in a pickup truck picks up a homeless man eating from a dumpster. He tells him he’s taking him to a shelter, but it’s actually Dwight’s house. Dwight then hits the man with a baseball bat. Dwight and his sister Jessie undress the unconscious man and drain his blood into a bucket. They feed the blood to their sickly-looking brother, Thomas. Then they all watch TV together. Credits roll.
Dwight goes to a motel the next morning and hires a hooker. These folks clearly don’t live a very normal life. Dwight trades the homeless man’s clothes for a karaoke machine to give to Thomas. Thomas tries it out but passes out in the middle of the song. They give him some more blood.
Jessie mentions that she saw a prostitute working outside the diner this morning, and she’d make a great catch. Dwight is getting tired of the killing, but he doesn’t know of any alternatives. Thomas seems like a nice kid, harmless and helpless, but he’s always in need of more blood. He heard some kids playing outside during the daytime, but Jessie explains that he can’t go out at that time of day. Jessie is watching the prostitute’s room when she sees Dwight go in there the next day. Dwight wants to run away with the prostitute, but she doesn’t want to go.
Jessie knows something is up. “I don’t know what’d do if you left us,” she explains. “It has to be the three of us together.” She doesn’t mention knowing about the prostitute. Dwight picks up another homeless guy the next morning. This one, Eduardo, fights back and leads Dwight on a chase through the woods before Dwight catches him again. Dwight ends up cutting himself and dripping blood into a bowl for Thomas. Thomas asks, “is this your blood?” Jessie is very dissatisfied, and she goes to the motel where she captures Dwight’s favorite prostitute. Dwight is very upset by this and leaves, but he soon comes back.
It turns out Dwight didn’t kill Eduardo but instead is keeping him tied up out in the shed. Meanwhile, Thomas is getting really tired of being locked up all the time, and everyone is getting upset with the situation. Thomas throws his bowl on the floor, and Jessie says, “Do you have any idea what we do to get that blood?”
Eduardo escapes and gets into the house, and Dwight has no choice but to finally kill him. This time, Thomas witnesses the whole thing.
The next morning, Thomas listens to normal children playing outside, and he writes them a note on a paper airplane. The sun burns his arm where the light hits it. He starts obsessing over playing with other kids, and then one of them finds his paper plane and comes to the door. His name is Turner. Thomas offers Turner a glass of blood just as Dwight comes in. Dwight is just about to let him leave when Jessie comes in with another dead body. Turner is hiding in the closet and sees the whole thing.
Jessie opens the door, and Turner stabs her and runs off. Dwight pursues Turner’s bicycle with Dwight’s truck and catches him. They have a little talk, and Dwight lets the kid go. Meanwhile, Thomas watches Jessie bleed to death as she tells him, “We shouldn’t waste it.”
Dwight comes home to find Thomas biting Jessie’s neck, vampire-style. Dwight then buries the bodies out in the backyard with the others and cleans up the blood. He then packs up his clothes and gets ready to leave forever. He tells Thomas that he’s going. As Dwight sits in the diner having lunch, he looks at another family and changes his mind. He goes back to Thomas; he just couldn’t do it. Thomas asks Dwight to open the window, which he does. We see the bright light fill the room but don’t see what happens to Thomas. Later, we see Dwight driving away in his truck.
Commentary
How far would you go for family? That’s the question here. Dwight hates what they’ve been doing but doesn’t see a way out of it and is trying to minimize the mayhem they cause, while Jessie doesn’t have that problem. Ironically, Thomas never actually hurts anyone, and he’s the only innocent one in the film, which is pretty weird since he’s the real monster, at least maybe.
Through at least the first half of the film, you have to wonder who’s the sick one here, Thomas or Jessie? Is the whole vampire thing for real, or is it just a mental illness? Once we see Thomas get burned by the sun, that question goes on the back burner for a while, but it’s clear that Jessie’s the instigator of most of this. Although we don’t see Thomas burn in the sun, it is heavily implied that Thomas was, in fact, a real vampire, and the sunlight did kill him.
If they had gone the completely vague route and not shown us Thomas burning his arm in the sun, we wouldn’t know for sure. Since they did show us this, then we cant argue whether Thomas was really a vampire. If they’d left it an open question, that would have been fine, but by letting us know it was all real, there are a disappointing number of questions. How did he get that way? What happened to the group’s parents? Was Thomas born that way?