Grey (Lauren Beatty) is a singer-songwriter who has enjoyed a major hit with her debut album, but now comes the tricky second effort and she is suffering anxiety nightmares because of it, not to mention an increasing sense of writer's block. Those dreams are weirdly specific, however, as she envisages herself hunting and eating wild animals, as if she were some kind of beast herself, and as a near-lifelong vegan, this is troubling her a lot more than she thinks it should. She sees a psychiatrist (Michael Ironside) as the dreams are dangerously close to becoming hallucinations, but decides that as long as she has medication, she can find the courage to join forces with a new producer, Vaughn Daniels (Greg Bryk) and forge ahead...
I mean, who cares if this Vaughn guy was accused of murdering a previous collaborator when he produced her songs, he gets the job done, right? Therefore with all the oblivious nature of characters taking a carriage ride up to Castle Dracula in a Hammer horror, Grey and her girlfriend Charlie (Katharine King So) drive through a snowbound Canadian forest to reach his mansion cum recording studio - Charlie is an artist so can get some painting done while Grey lays down some tracks, is the general idea. Already from the minute we meet Vaughn, our impression is of some pretentious guy who sees not respecting boundaries as a method of pushing his form of psychological shakeups onto Grey as a matter of professional course, and we would not be wrong about that. But even then, he goes too far.
In case you hadn't twigged, Bloodthirsty was a werewolf yarn, a companion piece to director Ameila Moses' other indie horror of 2020, Bleed With Me, which complemented the genre here by being about vampires. This one was not written by Moses as that had been, however, as scripting duties were taken by mother and daughter team Wendy Hill-Tout and Lowell, the latter a singer-songwriter herself who also penned the sensitive tunes that Grey composes in the context of the film. At points you may wonder whether she would not be better off writing and performing the angriest death metal imaginable for the benefit of her personality, which seems to be eroding as her bestial side emerges, but nope, her songs are as indie as the movie's production was. It was the sort of film that appeared to take the same cavalier attitude to bunny health as Watership Down.
