Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.0

A Single Shot Blu-ray Movie Review

Bullseye.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 21, 2014

Like a lot of guys who were raised in the semi-wild west, it was a big day when I got my first rifle when I was a relatively young boy. My Dad used to take me out target shooting and spent quite a bit of time trying to train me to shoot right handed, despite the fact that I am resolutely a leftie (ironically, my Dad was, too, but had learned to shoot right handed, especially after his left arm was severely wounded in World War II). He insisted that I’d be able to expel shells and reload faster as a right handed shooter, but I just could not master aiming and firing without my dominant arm and hand in play. There’s a chilling scene near the end of A Single Shot, a low key but often harrowing drama set in an amorphous backwoods town full of various lowlifes, when John Moon (Sam Rockwell) probably wished he had learned to aim and shoot with his left hand. A Single Shot may remind some of Winter's Bone and Deliverance in its depiction of a rural lifestyle that involves some very scary people and various illegal activities. There’s nary a moral center in the entire film, save for perhaps a couple of tangential supporting characters. Moon himself is shown to be of questionable ethics from virtually the first sequence. Not only does he shoot a woman in the woods (which is admittedly a tragic mistake) during a hunting expedition, he wastes no time in trying to hide the crime, in the process of which he discovers a huge stash of cash which evidently belonged to the woman, at which point he just decides he might as well take that for all his “hard work”. A bit later it turns out that even his hunting is illegal—John has several arrests for poaching on conservancy land. Obviously, this is not going to be a traditional hero a typical audience will be able to root for.

Quite a bit of A Single Shot plays out without a single word of dialogue. There are instead long (and sometimes uninterrupted) shots of John tooling about on the vast acreage surrounding his isolated mobile home, which is itself a kind of ramshackle affair which has definitely seen better days. After the opening sequence (which plays out with little more than a gasp of shock and some strained breathing), John deals with the body, finds the cash and then pretty much just returns to his routine. It’s only much later that the film finally begins to peel back the layers of this particular onion, showing a man down on his luck, a guy who had worked his family’s farm for all of his life until his father lost the farm to foreclosure. John has had a series of short term jobs since then, failing at most of them because they keep him cooped up inside, and he’s only recently become estranged from his wife Moira (Kelly Reilly) and toddler son Nolan.

John sees the windfall of cash as a saving grace delivered by some previously hidden deity, and he hopes to achieve a rapprochement with Moira, though she does not seem very interested in that prospect. In the meantime, John’s buddy Simon (Jeffrey Wright) returns to town and urges John to see the local attorney Pitt (William H. Macy) in order to deal with Moira’s divorce petition. John does go to see Pitt, asking him to delay the proceedings for as long as possible. Pitt is understandably intrigued when John plops a huge wad of cash on the desk as a down payment.

Within just a day or two, however, John’s panicked plans for his future life start to fall apart when he receives a series of threatening phone calls (as well as a brick through his trailer window) that alerts him to the fact that the money’s rightful owners either know or have guessed that John is in possession of it. A dangerous cat and mouse game ensues, with John slowly becoming aware he’s in the midst of a much larger, intertwined story where he has virtually no allies and has to decide how to ford his way through increasingly treacherous waters.

Rockwell does outstanding work in a role which has very little dialogue and where the actor must offer his portrayal mostly through action and reaction. Macy is a bit hammy here, adopting a physical disability for no real reason other than that it makes Pitt even more unusual than he would have been anyway. The supporting cast is filled with both understated (Reilly) and fairly hyperbolic (Joe Anderson as a backwoods ex-con) turns that add immeasurably to the film's ambience.

Writer Matthew F. Jones pares this story down to its barest essence, delivering a sense of increasing paranoia and stricture. But it’s director David M. Rosenthal who makes A Single Shot the viscerally memorable experience it is. Rosenthal isn’t necessarily subtle with his subtext of the hunter and the hunted, but he offers a moody, dour yet incredibly picturesque tour of a rugged world where a gun determines who lives and who dies—sometimes. The film’s chilling final moments prove that sometimes wildlife can survive while men end up ensnared in a deadly web of their own making.

A Single Shot Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

A Single Shot is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.40:1. A Single Shot is a dark film—and not just with regard to its subject matter. Director David M. Rosenthal and cinematographer Eduard Grau film this in almost uniformly low light conditions, even in the gray, overcast out of doors sequences. That means that a lot of A Single Shot is very hard to see. There are several salient examples here, including in the opening sequence, where John stuffs a body into a dumpster and Rosenthal films from inside the container. It is literally impossible to make out anything that's going on. Later, in several sequences in John's dimly lit trailer, there is only a modicum of visual information available. The outdoor and daylight scenes are color graded uniformly to a slate gray color which augments the stifling mood of the film but which deprives the film from popping in any meaningful way. A few close-ups reveal excellent fine detail, but these are the exceptions rather than the rule. The good news in all this is that there are no compression artifacts like spiking noise in the darkest sequences.

A Single Shot Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

A Single Shot's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track is nicely nuanced and contains a wealth of ambient environmental effects, but it really only totally bursts into life during the few times that guns are fired. Otherwise, this is an unusually restrained soundtrack, filled with sounds like cawing crows or a plane flying overhead rather than even much dialogue. When dialogue is spoken, it's delivered cleanly and clearly. Atli Orvasson's brooding score, which includes some throbbing low frequencies in some of the tenser moments, also fills the surrounds quite nicely.

A Single Shot Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Making Of (1080i; 26:19) contains some better than average interviews, along with the expected behind the scenes footage and snippets from the film.


• Interviews include:

  Sam Rockwell (John) (480i; 23:25)

  William H. Macy (Pitt) (480i; 6:41)

• Trailer (1080p; 1:32)

A Single Shot Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

A Single Shot is a really interesting, ultimately devastating, film that is unique in a number of ways, including long patches without a word of dialogue and a really claustrophobic ambience that hangs over the proceedings like the ubiquitous clouds covering the woods throughout the film. Rockwell does really good work here, showing a conflicted soul who wants to right his life but isn't capable of doing so without making a series of really bad decisions. While this Blu-ray reproduces an organic looking film experience, it's resolutely dark, making it at times virtually impossible to make out what's going on. Still, A Single Shot comes Recommended.