Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.5

A Bigger Splash Blu-ray Movie Review

Wait—where’s Daryl Hannah?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 7, 2016

Without trying to frame a horrifying event in a glib tone, the appalling drowning death of little Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi created a “splash” on the international news scene, and in the hearts of many global citizens who up until those shocking images of his limp little body on a Mediterranean Sea beach seemingly ignited a collective conscience had probably not been paying that much attention to this particular MIddle Eastern crisis. While even conflating the term “splash” with such a tragic event might seem heartless, screenwriter David Kajganich and director Luca Guadagnino do pretty much the exact same thing in A Bigger Splash, albeit late in a film where other, ostensibly “smaller” splashes have already occurred. This 2015 kinda sorta remake of 1969’s La Piscine (note that the link points to a Region B locked disc) has subtext galore, including a tangential refugee situation that informs the corners of what is otherwise a twisting and winding psychological thriller that pits a quartet of so-called Beautiful People against each other within the confines of a spectacularly scenic locale. Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton) is a world famous androgynous rock star, kind of a distaff version of David Bowie, who has retreated to the island of Pantelleria in the wake of surgery to repair a vocal node issue which may or may not threaten her career. She’s accompanied by her filmmaker boyfriend Paul De Smedt (Matthias Schoenaerts), who acts as a kind of more serious counterweight to Marianne’s sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll excesses. That’s not to suggest Paul doesn’t have his own wild side, as the film liberally demonstrates in some moments that are more explicit than the 1969 version of this tale would have been able to depict (at least without generating a dreaded X rating). The two have been together for years, but there’s still an obvious spark between them, though there are perhaps hints of discontent floating just beneath the surface (to utilize a swimming pool reference). When Marianne’s ex-lover, famous record producer Harry Hawkes (Ralph Fiennes), suddenly shows up, the lovers’ idyll is rudely interrupted, a disconnect made even more problematic by the fact that Harry has brought along his estranged adult daughter Penelope Lanier (Dakota Johnson). Suddenly the duo is a quartet, each with competing motivations and allegiances (or lack thereof), throwing everything into emotional chaos. If La Piscine rather imaginatively wove together elements of everything from Diabolique to Lolita to Knife in the Water, A Bigger Splash would seem to have more on its mind than the roiling theatrics of this set of four entitled souls, and that includes the aforementioned migrant issue which seems to suggest that despite the film’s ostensible focus, there’s a wider world of trauma that typically gets ignored, at least that is until a sweet little boy washes up dead somewhere.

Note: It's impossible to detail parts of A Bigger Splash's plot without at least alluding to one major development. Those wary of supposed "spoilers" are encouraged to skip down to the technical portions of the review, below.

Perhaps it’s the very fact that so much of A Bigger Splash concentrates on the wealthy elite that its sudden detour into talk about refugees when the film segues from interpersonal soap opera to murder investigation makes such a decidedly odd impact. Up until then, the film has already traversed a wide array of personalities and various love affairs, either longstanding, dormant or nascent. Early scenes show the passion that still exists between Marianne and Paul, and once Harry and Pen show up, various new pairings begin accruing, something that gives the film its most potent thriller ambience. It soon becomes apparent that Harry probably has designs on wooing Marianne back into his fold, while it’s tantalizingly unclear exactly what it is Pen may want from Paul.

Paul, for all his passion, is kind of a tamped down guy, seemingly the polar opposite of the ebullient and frankly kind of annoying Harry. Similarly, Marianne’s recent surgery has made her more or less mute (virtually all of Swinton’s actual dialogue comes courtesy of flashback sequences, which are pretty ubiquitous), leaving some of the heavy lifting, conversation wise, fall to Pen. Harry is obviously a master manipulator, and he seems to be zeroing in on one of Paul’s chief behavioral weaknesses in order to perhaps exploit a fissure that already exists in Paul’s relationship with Marianne. Meanwhile, Pen doesn’t really make a secret of the fact she knows she’s young and gorgeous and almost unavoidably seductive.

Part of what ails A Bigger Splash is its emotional distance from these characters. It’s hard to get too worked up over a quartet who have had a silver spoon rather luxuriously placed in their mouths for years (Pen perhaps less so, but not enough to really matter), and so when things start going from neurotic to pathological, it’s more of a convenient plot artifice than anything. That leaves the central act of deceit in the film as a kind of hollow enterprise that never resonates and certainly doesn’t work up the requisite amount of angst any decent noir-esque deconstruction of torpid morality might seem to offer. The whole ambiguous nature of the “crime” at the center of the film is also undercut by the sudden allusion to foreign interlopers (the police investigator mentions having other, more numerous, drownings to investigate than the one involving Marianne and her coterie), something that is utilized here to give Marianne an “out” for her suspicions as to what really happened. But also undercutting the film’s attempt at a kind of European psychological investigative ambience is an almost clownish finale that casts the police detective as an over effusive fan. It’s a distinctly different final moment from a perhaps more effectively ambiguous and chilling last shot in La Piscine.

A Bigger Splash Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

A Bigger Splash is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. Both the film's closing credits as well as the IMDb hint that this feature was shot traditionally on 35mm with some digital interstitials (if I'm understanding the closing credits correctly, the digital elements may have been relegated to underwater photography, but I can't state that authoritatively). This transfer is by and large excellent looking, though it suffers at times from being almost too sundrenched, something that along with a tendency for "arty" shots that seemingly intentionally obfuscate detail, can lead to occasional soft looking stretches. Fine detail is quite excellent in the many brightly lit scenes when close-ups are employed. The palette is wonderfully vivid, though occasionally either color grading or pushed contrast can tend to blanch things, as in an early scene when Paul and Marianne have covered themselves in clay and lay on a secluded beach. There are also several fairly dark (and extended) sequences later in the film that may not suffer from outright crush, but which don't offer much in the way of detail, let alone fine detail. Also, a longish party scene is bathed in blue and detail levels are understandably a bit less precise. All of this said, the general look of this transfer is commendably organic, with no compression issues of any note to address in this review.

A Bigger Splash Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

A Bigger Splash's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 tracks plays off the fact that Marianne is a supposed rock idol by filling the soundtrack with all sorts of source cues, not necessarily relegated to the world of rock. That approach tends to provide consistent support for surround activity, albeit on a perhaps subliminal plane at times. There's also nice attention paid to quite a bit of ambient environmental sounds around the island paradise, with a nicely spacious feel at Paul and Marianne's villa. Dialogue is also cleanly presented and well prioritized on this problem free track.

A Bigger Splash Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Promotional Featurettes focus on various characters or elements like locations and are almost laughably called "featurettes" considering their extreme brevity. These are more like Promotional Trailers:

  The Silent One (1080p; 00:35)

  The Extroverted One (1080p; 00:34)

  The Young One (1080p; 00:35)

  The Mysterious One (1080p; 00:34)

  Story and Cast (1080p; 2:10)

  Beneath the Surface (1080p; 2:16)

  The Inspiration (1080p; 1:09)

  Another World (1080p; 1:51)

• Gallery (1080p; 2:25) offers both Manual and Auto Advance options. The timing is for the Auto Advance option.


• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 1:57)

A Bigger Splash Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There's a lot of really interesting content in A Bigger Splash, and the film is elevated by some superb performances, but I have to confess I ended up feeling like the film's seeming literary ambitions weren't fully realized. There's a kind of odd disparity in tone throughout this piece, with some scenes tipping awfully close to Sirkian melodrama and others precariously (and perhaps unintentionally) close to farce. Still, this is a really interesting and often quite sumptuous looking film, and fans of the cast should find enough here to satisfy them, despite some lingering flaws. Technical merits are strong, and A Bigger Splash comes Recommended.