Blood Vessel is a 2019 horror film that was filmed in Melbourne, Australia. The film was directed by Justin Dix and written by Dix and Jordan Prosser. It stars Alyssa Sutherland, Robert Taylor, Nathan Phillips, Christopher Kirby, John Lloyd Fillingham, and Alex Cooke. The film premiered as a closing night film at 2019 FilmQuest in Provo, Utah, where it was nominated for eleven awards, winning for Best Art Department, Best Costume, and Best Supporting Actress for Sutherland. The film was released on 21 July 2020 via video-on-demand service Shudder.
Plot
In late 1945, near the end of World War II, a life raft is adrift in the North Atlantic, carrying the survivors of a hospital ship that was hit by a German torpedo and sunk. The survivors - American cook Bigelow, American mechanic Jackson, British nurse Jane Prescott, British codebreaker Gerard Faraday, Australian soldier Sinclair, Russian sniper Alexander Teplov, and Malone, the American captain of the hospital ship - have been adrift for days and have run out of food when suddenly a Nazi minesweeper drifts by. Teplov uses the last bullet in Malone's rifle to shoot one of the ship's cables and the survivors use it to climb up onto the ship's deck, but while Malone is trying to board, the ladder snaps and he falls into the water and is killed by the ship's propellers. The remaining survivors investigate the seemingly-abandoned ship, with Sinclair, Teplov, and Bigelow going to the bridge and finding that the steering wheel has been chained in place. They also find the body of one of the German crew, decapitated and with huge veins extending out of his neck and sticking to the wall. Below-deck, Jackson checks out the engine and finds bodies that seem to have been burned to death, and also discovers that the boiler has failed and the ship could explode at any time if the engine keeps running, so he shuts off the engine, leaving the ship dead in the water.
The survivors regroup in the galley and discover a young girl hiding there. The girl is frightened and reflexively bites Jane when Jane attempts to reach out to her, but Jane calms her down and comforts her. When the girl finally speaks, Teplov identifies her language as Romanian despite not being able to fully understand it, and the girl introduces herself as Mya. Mya leads the survivors to a heavy locked door further below-deck and the group hears a man speaking German on the other side. They cautiously open the door and find a surviving German crew member wielding a Luger, who becomes terrified at the sight of Mya. He fires at Mya multiple times, wounding Teplov's leg and hitting Jackson in the head, killing him; Teplov kills the German survivor with a knife. Bigelow and Sinclair investigate the room that the German survivor was holed up in and find multiple large wooden boxes, a box of gold, and a box filled with crucifixes and transparent glass containers shaped like grenades that are filled with water. Jane, Teplov, and Mya return to the galley where Jane treats Teplov's bullet wound; Faraday sneaks off on his own and attempts to reach someone on the ship's shortwave radio; and Sinclair and Bigelow look through the quarters of the ship's dead captain, finding a wealth of photographs and documents showing Nazi soldiers unearthing ancient artifacts, including what appear to be multiple sarcophagi. They also find a thick tome showing images of monstrous creatures. Bigelow decides to go back to the storage room to take some of the gold for himself, and also opens up one of the large wooden boxes, which contains one of the sarcophagi from the photographs. He breaks the chains holding it shut and opens it, hoping to find more treasure, but instead finds a slumbering creature with a bat-like face. The creature suddenly awakens and kills Bigelow; Sinclair encounters the creature as it attacks Bigelow but manages to lock the storage room door, trapping it inside. The creature's awakening triggers a transformation in Mya, who is revealed to be of the same species; she suddenly attacks Jane, but Teplov shoots her, scaring her off.