7 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
In fourteenth-century England, peasant girl Christine Carpenter is so attracted to a statue of the Virgin Mary that the local priest (who lusts after her) suggests she be walled up in the church as an anchoress, a holy woman with responsibility for blessing the villagers. But when the priest has Christine's mother tried as a witch, she digs herself out of her cell, a crime for which the punishment is death...
Starring: Natalie MorseHorror | 100% |
Drama | 37% |
Period | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 720p
Aspect ratio: 1.70:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.66:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0
English SDH
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 3.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 1.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Note: This film is available on Blu-ray as a part of All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror.
All the Haunts Be Ours advertises itself as "the most comprehensive collection of its kind", which may initially beg the question as to "kind of
what?". But the release also comes with a front cover sobriquet
proclaiming it "a compendium of folk horror", which may then beg the next obvious question as to what exactly "folk horror" is. In that
regard, this set
begins with a fascinating and diverse documentary which has its own subtitle referencing folk horror, Woodlands Dark and Days
Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, which provides a veritable glut of clips from international films which director (and this entire set's guiding
light) Kier-La Janisse has assembled to help define the genre, but perhaps the best answer is to simply echo a certain Supreme Court Justice named
Potter Stewart who was trying to decide a case involving supposed pornography, and who famously opined, "I shall not today attempt further to define
the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I
know it when I see it. . ."
Anchoress is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Severin Films with an AVC encoded 720p transfer in 1.70:1. Severin's insert booklet states this was "mastered in HD by the British Film Institute". The absence of any provenance in terms of what kind of element was utilized may be a bit of a warning sign, as should the somewhat unusual resolution of the presentation, though quite a bit of this film's really lustrous black and white cinematography still offers considerable strengths. As can be seen in some of the screenshots I've uploaded to accompany this review, presentationally Anchoress can verge on the near hallucinatory at times, and some of these stylistic choices definitely lead to a diminution in detail levels. In more relatively "normal" moments, detail levels are often very good, and in selected close-ups, excellent. Perhaps due to the source element or resolution, or a combination of the two, grain frequently looks pretty mottled to the point that it can take on the appearance of macroblocking. My score is 3.25.
Anchoress features a nicely expressive DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track. Despite the ultimately claustrophobic confines Christine finds herself in, the film has a glut of nicely rendered ambient environmental sounds or "manmade" effects like clanging church bells, and those help to establish a nicely vivid soundstage. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout, though rather large swaths of this film can play out without much speaking, and with the soundtrack simply awash in ambient environmental effects. Optional English subtitles are available.
This is a really interesting film from any number of angles, and one of those is the way it kind of achieves something like the same intensity of emotion that underlies more florid depictions in Dreyer's telling of the Joan of Arc story, though in manifestly different ways. Visually this film is a real stunner, and some may find the video presentation here lacking, though I still found it more than serviceable. With that caveat noted, Recommended.
(Still not reliable for this title)
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