Intellectual Xavier (Adriano Luz) drags his wife Helena (Manuela Couto) and kids (the oldest son ready to break away, the daughter a teenage mother, and the youngest son still not having gotten over his fear of the dark) away from Lisbon to a backwoods village and an old house that he has inherited from a very distant uncle. Much more worrying than the familial tensions, seances, rumors of witchcraft, werewolves, and the very real exorcisms performed on the village's children are the unexplainable sights and sounds within the house and differing effects they are having on the family's children. A slow-burn art house horror film, BAD BLOOD (COISA RUIM) is close in spirit to the films of Manoel de Oliveira (with whom this film shares producer Paolo Branco) in juxtaposing after dinner conversation about faith and superstition with a steady build-up of the inexplicable. Unlike so many more conventional horror movies, the approach to the familiar basic storyline of a family moving into a haunted house is more realistically handled. The unexplained is questionable, the family is quietly dysfunctional enough to not communicate, characters question their susceptibility to visions/hallucinations, and the family confide in the priest because to an extent he is just as much an outsider as they are amidst the superstitious village populace. What doesn't really work is the pacing which is more "arthouse-like" than actual arthouse in its combination of cutting away when things get strange and contemplative holding of some shots beyond interest and the mystery behind the haunting was always bound to disappoint after the effective build-up of dread despite an understated climax.