Death of Me Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.0
Overall		2.5

Death of Me Blu-ray Movie Review

The Wicker Woman.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 27, 2020

Death of Me at least offers an interesting, if ultimately derivative, setup that, in addition to one major referent listed below, is one part "Stopover in a Quiet Town", the memorable episode from The Twilight Zone: Season 5, and one part Harvest Home, a Thomas Tryon novel (later adapted into the linked made for television film) that I've referenced previously a number of times, including in our Midsommar Blu-ray review. There's also arguably just the hint of a certain Val Lewton-esque quality, a la films like I Walked with a Zombie, or what might be thought of as neo-Lewton films like The Believers. That might seem like a heady brew, especially when a "wait, you also get. . ." element of found footage at least tangentially enters the fray, but unfortunately despite a pretty evocative mood and some admitted scares along the way, Death of Me comes off as overly predictable, too clearly aiming at its big "M. Night Shyamalan meets The Wicker Man moment", which in this case turns out to be as resolutely expected as a lot of the rest of the story.

Christine (Maggie Q) and Neil (Luke Hemsworth) awaken in their Thailand hotel room to a scene of absolute chaos. Dirt is all over everything, including themselves, their belongings are scattered all over the place, there's an ominous news broadcast on the television warning of the biggest typhoon in years headed straight for the island they're on, and they have absolutely no memory of how they got to their room or what precipitated such a scene of disorder. They're also desperately late for the boat taking them on the first jaunt of their way back home post-vacation, but when they hurriedly arrive at the port, they realize they don't have their passports and are thus stranded until they can make other arrangements. Heading back to the hotel, Neil, a travel photographer, decides to pull up files on his phone to see what they might have been up to the night before, and, as expected, it involved a lot of drinking, including one mysterious substance. A much more disturbing video is also on his phone showing a violent Neil evidently murdering Christine. Well, all righty then, though it's interesting to note that all of this occurs between some introductory production entity mastheads and the actual title credit for the film, which occurs well over fifteen minutes into the proceedings.

Christine begins experiencing all sorts of odd phenomena, both internally (she keeps coughing up dirt, as if she had been buried, something the video shows happening), and externally (she's wearing a weird talisman that she has no memory of getting, but every time she takes it off, her maladies worsen). She and Neil set off to at least try to find the waitress who may have served them spiked drinks the night before, but Christine's hallucinations ( are they hallucinations?) frequently interrupt the narrative with a procession (in more ways than one) of odd, often foreboding, visions.

What's kind of odd about all of the atavistic subtext is that Thailand is largely Buddhist, a religion which, to my limited knowledge anyway, does not engage in any sort of pagan rituals and/or sacrifice as has been seen in at least some previous films (including a couple linked to, above). That makes the film's setting perhaps doubly perplexing, as my hunch is few in the audience will have any sort of context for what's going on. In that regard, audiences probably didn't have much context for what happens in films like The Wicker Man or Midsommar, but both of those films in particular had "Moishe the Explainer" moments at least attempting to elucidate local customs.

As such, a lot in this film doesn't really make sense, even within the context provided by the screenplay. But there are all sorts of lapses of logic scattered throughout a story that seems destined to reveal facts about Christine that just about any student of this subgenre of horror film will have worked out in broad outline form at least much earlier than is disclosed in the film itself. There's a lot of both gorgeous and disturbing imagery in Death of Me, and there's a definitely spooky mood that ebbs and flows throughout the proceedings, but many viewers will probably feel like they've seen this story before, albeit in radically different settings.

Death of Me Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Death of Me is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. The IMDb has no technical information of any import, and unfortunately even the making of featurette on the disc didn't provide a clear enough view of any cameras for me to offer a make and model (a number of cameras had "FXLion" on the side). All of that said, this is a rather sumptuous looking presentation a lot of the time, courtesy of its often gorgeous Thai settings. A lot of the film takes place outside, where the palette is nicely suffused and detail levels remain consistently high. As should be expected, some of Christine's hallucinations (repeat: are they hallucinations?) are understandably hazy and ill defined, and some of the nighttime material suffers from a bit of murk. Also, I'm not sure if this was done intentionally for "stylistic" purposes or is just the result of bad capture, but a few isolated snippets look considerably rougher than the bulk of the presentation (see screenshot 19). There is also some minor banding on display during changes in lighting conditions. It also looks like a few scattered aerial shots may have been captured at lower resolutions than the bulk of the film.

Death of Me Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Death of Me has a nicely immersive DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that commendably doesn't indulge in a bunch of startle effects with jump cuts, but instead tends to build an almost subliminal angst with washes of LFE that are mixed with other effects or score to help create a brooding, menacing aspect in the sound design. The glut of outdoor material offers good placement of ambient environmental effects. Dialogue is generally rendered cleanly, though some of the native Thai speakers have pretty heavy accents when speaking English. Optional subtitles are available.

Death of Me Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Island Magic: Conjuring Death of Me (1080p; 23:13) is an above average making of featurette, with several interesting interviews, as well as the traditional mixture of behind the scenes footage and snippets from the film.

Death of Me Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

In doing background research for this review, I found an interview with director Darren Lee Bousman where he discusses the fact that the original version of the screenplay had the story taking place in Haiti and featuring voodoo, which of course tends to cement the Lewton connection I mentioned above, while also perhaps helping to explain some of the film's weirder elements (at least within the "final destination" of Thailand). There are some scattered scares here, and some undeniably disturbing imagery, but the story itself is old (as in virtually pagan) hat. Technical merits are generally solid for those considering a purchase.