In short: Bliss (2019)

Painter Dezzy (Dora Madison) is suffering from a bad case of artist’s block that has left her unable to paint anything for quite some time now, which in turn leaves her unable to pay her bills. Dezzy’s life is a huge mess, and she’s clearly one of those artists who believe that good art can only come from the ecstasy of self-ruination, so what better way to recapture her creative spirit than go on a giant bender.

Once she tries a new drug called “bliss”, things get a bit weirder than on your usual drug bender, though, and she is plagued by intense hallucinations, even more aggressive mood swings than seem typical for her anyway, as well as a violent lust for blood that makes a woman’s social life rather problematic. On the positive side, her creativity is rekindled.

After the pretty great The Mind’s Eye and its attempt to make something like Cronenberg’s Scanners but more ecstatic and more like an old school VHS cover, Bliss with its intense, colour-drenched phantasmagorical bad drug trip visuals must have seemed like the logical next step to take for director Joe Begos. For my tastes at least, the way the film visually and acoustically assaults the viewer with colours and noises as if it were directed by Gaspar Noé’s more unhinged brother is quite the success, turning the resulting film into something very special indeed.

As a blood-drenched meditation (if you can call something that screams in your face for eighty minutes a “meditation”) on the vagaries of art and the joys and horrors of self-destruction, and the kind of vampirism that’s nasty like cannibalism instead of sexy like a teen vampire, this is quite the film, throwing itself at an audience with the same abandon as Dezzy at drugs or a throat, and Madison at her role, for that matter. I’m not generally a big fan of the “artists need to suffer” theory of art, but one doesn’t have to be to find something of interest in the film, for Dezzy is neither being shown as a role model nor as a clear cautionary tale. Bliss is simply conveying intensities, moods and ideas concerning this theme and letting the battered viewer sort it out all for themselves.


With this the film may rub quite a few viewers the wrong way, I imagine, presenting pretty much the opposite of slow horror yet also spitting blood in the face of fun horror only out for “scares”, and probably also alienating quite a few viewers through its sheer aesthetic abandon. But then, I really cannot see how else Begos could have told this particular tale quite this effectively without going all out in all kinds of ways. I’m very happy he did.