Eastwood: Blood Work (2002)

With the exception of Play Misty For Me, Blood Work is probably the closest Clint Eastwood has come to a slasher film, and it’s got a similarly bewildering, disorienting sense of space as his earliest masterpiece. In fact, given that Play Misty For Me was originally intended to be a serial killer film set in L.A., Blood Work perhaps makes most sense as the first great film Eastwood never made, creating quite a melancholy, elegaic tone – Eastwood plays Michael Connelly’s popular FBI agent Terry McCaleb, who, at the end of his novel cycle, ends up committing suicide. In this part of the story, though, he’s recently retired, having suffered a heart attack (and received a heart transplant) while pursuing a hooded serial killer. Coincidentally, the heart donor turns out to have been one of the killer’s other victims, prompting a Terry to start investigating the case on his own time, with the help of the victim’s sister (Wanda de Jesus) and despite warnings from his physician (Anjelica Huston). Most of the film that follows plays out as a procedural, as Terry cruises an increasingly porous, amorphous Los Angeles, equally accessible from the air and from the ground, in search of a vanishing-point or sightline that always seems to be missing. As the camera responds in turn, riding great gusts of air in an effort to keep up with the mobile, shifting, distributed presence of the serial killer, it feels as if Eastwood’s managed to position the whole procedural at the thermocline where sea breezes and desert breezes meet – Terry’s retired to a marina on the edges of the city, while the investigation tends to take him to the fringes of the desert (which often feels like Nevada or New Mexico more than outer Los Angeles), creating sharp, shuddering changes in temperature and air pressure, moments of geophysical glitch that precipitate Terry’s perennial heart palpitations, his sense of how viscerally and physiologically he’s locked into the city and its stories. Given that the killer tends to communicate with Terry through shaky, handheld footage of his victims, Los Angeles is eventually more or less condensed to a marina on the edge of the desert with a whole lot of elasticised, digital glitch in between, as Terry drives himself to the point of death by investigating the crime that kept him alive, in an odd, middle ground between 90s slasher horror and 00s digital horror, fascinating as it is surprising to find in Eastwood’s late filmography.