In a rural mountain town, an unstable drug addict must unravel a surreal murder mystery as he’s terrorized by malevolent ghosts, a deranged sheriff, and the frightening hallucinations from his withdrawal.

It’s hard enough to quit an addiction, let alone doing it with an overbearing cop hell-bent on catching you slipping and a deluge of violent hallucinations haunting your dreams. This is the struggle facing Brian Barnes (Clint Carney) in Dry Blood. The film opens on Brian making calling a woman who’s helped him get sober before, telling her to meet him at a cabin that he seems to use exclusively for that purpose. Things get off to a rocky start as he starts drinking and taking whatever drugs he can get almost immediately after making it to the cabin. This leads to an awkward encounter with the local sheriff, credited simply as cop and played by director Kelton Jones.

Brian brings attention to himself by dropping a bottle of wine and ends up getting interrogated by the sheriff about his condition and how long he planned on staying on “his mountain.” As he pays for his food and the broken bottle, he overhears the sheriff muttering something about liking his meat with a bit of buckshot but when questioned acts as though Brian is just hearing things. This proves to be more than a simple encounter when the sheriff keeps finding reasons to bump into and continues to intimidate and gaslight Brian. Or at least it seems that way but there is always a lingering question, particularly with his tendency to fall off the horse in a variety of different ways, how much of this is actually occurring and how much is a product of the numerous withdrawals.

Eventually, Anna (Jaymie Valentine), the woman who Brian invited to the cabin in the first scene ends up arriving but this proves to be little comfort as their complicated history mixes with his cop problems and a series of surreal and disturbing hallucinations to push him further into paranoia and withdrawal. What you end up with is a pretty decent setup for a trippy, Jacob’s Ladder-style hallucinatory horror and Carney does a pretty bang-up job as the lead, giving us many flavors of insanity from the hysterical to the nearly catatonic. Jones does fairly well as the sheriff, though he takes his time in creating a real sense of menace, not fully bringing that to fruition until closer to the film’s climax with him spending much of that build-up as an almost comedic thorn in Brian’s side. The biggest problem Dry Blood has is Anna. To be fair, this is Valentine’s first proper acting credit and I’m sure she’ll get more comfortable with experience but she is very rigid here and lacks the emotional range, something that is made almost painfully evident as Carney tries to play off her but is continuously stifled by their lack of chemistry.

The visual style here is nothing too exciting but the effects and CG work are both impressive and there is some inventive camera work. These strengths are particularly highlighted during the film’s gory, off-the-rails finale that nets the film a few points for its sheer insanity. The score is generally pretty inoffensive but there are a few moments where the mixing seems off and the scene feels more dominated than complimented as a result. Dry Blood has some interesting ideas but the lack of chemistry between the leads is just so vital here and the fact that is isn’t there is a hard thing to overlook.