The Tree of Blood

Tangled Roots and Necessary Fictions

There’s a specific kind of vertigo that comes from watching a Julio Medem film. You don't just sit down to watch a story; you enter a labyrinth of coincidences and psychic resonance where the landscape itself seems to participate in the drama. In *The Tree of Blood* (2018), Medem returns to the lush, feverish territory he explored back in the nineties—that distinctive Basque country haze where passion and fatality are practically synonyms. He isn't interested in the clean, linear progression of a family biography. Instead, he treats ancestry like a Rorschach test, building a narrative that feels less like a movie and more like a fever dream someone is trying to explain to you at three in the morning.

The film operates on a conceit that is both audacious and faintly ridiculous: a young couple, Marc and Rebeca, hole up in an old, crumbling family estate to write down their shared history. As they write, the film visualizes the genealogy, weaving together decades of betrayal, madness, and illicit desire. It’s a bold structural choice. You aren't just watching a story; you’re watching the *construction* of a myth. At times, the film threatens to collapse under the weight of its own plot—there are so many twists that you start to wonder if Medem is playing a prank on the audience. But there’s a sincerity to the excess. He clearly believes that our pasts aren't tidy lists of dates and names, but messy, overlapping fictions we tell ourselves to survive.



The director's obsession with the "connectedness of things" is everywhere here. If you’ve spent any time with Medem’s filmography—his *Lovers of the Arctic Circle*, for instance—you recognize this architectural approach to human emotion. He views family trees not as vertical lines of descent, but as horizontal webs of influence. Watching the characters navigate these connections, I was struck by how little "realism" matters in this context. Some critics, notably *Variety's* Guy Lodge, pointed out the film’s "melodramatic sprawl," and he’s right. It *is* a soap opera disguised as a high-concept art film. Yet, I found myself forgiving the narrative gymnastics because the film captures a very specific, uncomfortable truth: the sense that we are all just unwitting actors repeating the sins of our ancestors.

The performances are the only things keeping this house of cards from tumbling over, and they are admirably committed. Najwa Nimri, a Medem stalwart whose career has been tied to his work since the nineties, brings an electric, jagged energy to the screen. She possesses a face that looks like it has lived through three lifetimes of trauma, and in this film, she’s allowed to be vulnerable and terrifying in equal measure. She grounds the more preposterous plot turns by simply refusing to play them as irony. She treats every revelation—no matter how operatic—as if it were a physical wound.



There’s a scene about midway through where the narrative begins to double back on itself, showing a pivotal confrontation from a different perspective. It’s the kind of thing we’ve seen in countless thrillers, but Medem shoots it with an intimacy that changes the stakes. The camera doesn't watch them like a jury; it watches them like an accomplice. You can feel the heat in the room, the claustrophobia of a history that refuses to stay buried. It’s in these moments that the film succeeds, not as a coherent mystery, but as a meditation on how we use memory to define ourselves.

Whether this all works depends entirely on your patience for coincidence. I admit, I found myself rolling my eyes at least once when yet another secret sibling or hidden affair came to light. It feels less like a family history and more like a tarot reading gone wrong. But then, isn't that what family feels like? A series of inexplicable, tangled events that we struggle to make sense of? Medem doesn't provide a tidy resolution because he doesn't believe in them. He leaves us with the tree itself—gnarled, messy, and still growing.



I left the film thinking about the "trees" we all carry—the stories we tell about where we come from. We prune the branches we don't like and highlight the ones that make us look noble. *The Tree of Blood* is a flawed, occasionally maddening piece of work, but it’s an honest one. It suggests that even the ugliest roots are part of what feeds the leaves. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s a compelling argument for the necessity of looking back, even when you know what you find there will hurt.