The Bloody Child is full of bleached colors, the kind of watercolor washes that you can hardly imagine in the real world. In the first, prolonged shot, a sunrise stretches across the horizon—wild lilac slashes that reflect barely a glimmer of light onto the rutted desert below. Eventually you start to make out figures moving around in the darkness. Eventually pale yellow light comes pouring through a jagged hole in the clouds. Eventually the film cuts to a veiled woman unlocking a blue gate and stepping through.

A feature-length experimental film that premiered at Sundance's inaugural Frontier section in 1996, The Bloody Child only really starts to make sense the second time through. It's about a Gulf War vet who murdered his wife and attempted to dispose of her body in the Mojave Desert. (The film is based on a story that was reported in the L.A. Times.) Once you catch on that the scenes of the man's arrest and temporary detention in the desert are playing out in reverse order, you'll only be more unsettled. How far back are we going to go? Do we have to watch him do whatever he did to make her body look like that?

Thankfully, I suppose, director Nina Menkes is working in the tradition of feminist experimental filmmaking, and no self-respecting heir to Chantal Akerman and Yvonne Rainer would risk you getting off on violence against women. The narrative starts with the digging of the unnamed woman's grave, and provides narrative distractions in two directions.

Anticipating all the ugliness that would happen in the second Iraq war, the film teases out the casual savagery in military life. From a distance, you hear callous scraps of conversation among the marines guarding the suspect: "And... I mean, I'm assuming that's his wife, so [inaudible] got mad at her"; "Maybe she was cheating or something"; "Looks like she got porked down there in the stomach." The desert sequences are intercut with a rowdy bar scene at Twentynine Palms, the marine base in the Mojave, where fights break out and guys talk shit about Iraqis. (The military apparently hasn't yet adopted the bizarre slurs of the current conflict, like the sarcastic honorific "hajji.") A high-strung marine back in the desert shoves the suspect's face in his murdered wife's punctured midsection, screaming, "Like that? Do you like that?" until a female captain (Menkes's sister Tinka Menkes) calls him off.

The other distraction is weirdly soothing and necessary to the structure of the film, but it's also dated. The childish voice of the murdered wife (Sherry Sibley) murmurs the witches' speeches from Macbeth, shrieks "Rest! In! Peace!" mockingly, and tosses out the occasional cultivated chortle. Meanwhile, a naked, dirty woman kneels in a forest, scrawling bloody words across her arms. It's very '90s.

The DVD includes a good 2006 interview with Menkes and contemporary interviews with the disaffected veterans who acted in her film.

annie@thestranger.com