The Sanguine unfolds as a quiet but unsettling meditation on emotional inheritance, bodily memory, and the unspoken violence that circulates within intimate spaces. Rather than advancing through conventional narrative propulsion, the film chooses an observational rhythm, allowing gestures, silences, and textures to carry its weight. This deliberate pacing is not an aesthetic indulgence; it is the film’s central ethical position. The Sanguine asks the viewer not to watch passively, but to remain present.

The film’s strength lies in its refusal to explain itself. Plot, in the traditional sense, is minimal, almost skeletal. What emerges instead is an atmosphere thick with anticipation, as if something unsayable hovers just outside the frame. The title itself gestures toward dual meanings—temperament and blood—suggesting a lineage of feeling rather than a chain of events. This ambiguity is carefully sustained throughout the film, never collapsing into symbolism for its own sake.

Visually, The Sanguine is striking in its restraint. The cinematography favours controlled compositions, often holding on faces and spaces a moment longer than comfort allows. These lingering shots, produced by the cinematographer duo of Patrick McNerney and Daniel Jones, create a quiet tension, making the ordinary feel unstable. The camera rarely asserts dominance; instead, it observes with a disciplined neutrality, allowing the audience to register micro-expressions and bodily unease. Light is used sparingly, not to beautify but to reveal—sometimes harshly, sometimes with an almost clinical detachment.

Colour plays a subtle but significant role. Muted tones dominate the frame, occasionally interrupted by warmer hues that hint at suppressed emotion rather than release it. This visual strategy mirrors the film’s thematic concern with repression: what is felt intensely but expressed minimally. Nothing here feels accidental. Every frame seems calibrated to resist excess.

Sound design is one of the film’s most effective tools. Dialogue is sparse, and when it appears, it rarely provides clarity. Instead, ambient sounds—such as breathing, distant movement, and the friction of bodies against space—become narrative agents. Silence is treated not as absence, but as pressure. It is the mastery of Patrick McNerney, who also dabbled with sound. In several key moments, the lack of music or explanatory sound forces the viewer into an uncomfortable intimacy with the image. The film trusts that discomfort.

Performances in The Sanguine are deliberately subdued. The actors work with minimalism, favoring internalized emotion over demonstrative expression. This restraint enhances the film’s psychological depth, suggesting lives shaped by forces they do not fully articulate or perhaps even consciously recognise. The body becomes a site of memory, carrying residues of past experiences without verbal acknowledgement. In this sense, the film aligns itself with a tradition of slow cinema that privileges interiority over exposition.

What makes The Sanguine particularly compelling is its ethical seriousness. The film does not aestheticise suffering, nor does it offer catharsis. There are no clear resolutions, no moral punctuation marks. Instead, it presents a condition—emotional, social, perhaps generational—and leaves it open for contemplation. This openness may frustrate viewers expecting narrative closure, but it is precisely what gives the film its lasting resonance.

Thematically, The Sanguine engages with questions of inheritance—not only biological, but emotional and behavioural. It suggests that certain patterns persist not because they are chosen, but because they are absorbed, normalised, and repeated. The film resists naming these patterns explicitly, allowing them to surface through repetition, gesture, and spatial arrangement. This approach avoids didacticism and respects the intelligence of the audience.

In the context of contemporary short-form cinema, The Sanguine stands out for its confidence. It does not rush to impress, nor does it rely on stylistic excess to mask conceptual thinness. Its ambition is quieter but more demanding: to hold attention through precision, patience, and emotional rigour. The film understands that restraint can be a radical gesture in an era saturated with overstimulation.

Ultimately, The Sanguine is a film that lingers. Not because of a single shocking image or dramatic turn, but because of the cumulative weight of what is withheld. It invites reflection rather than reaction, making it well-suited for festival audiences attuned to cinema as an experiential and ethical encounter. This is a work that trusts its form, respects its subject, and leaves its audience with questions that do not dissipate once the screen fades to black.

Therefore, I would like to rate the film 4 out of 5 stars.