Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		4.0

Elizabeth Harvest Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson May 6, 2020

Note that this review includes some spoilers.

In 1697 French author Charles Perrault wrote La Barbe bleue (The History of Blue Beard), which appeared in his collection, Histoires ou contes du temps passé (Stories or Tales of Past Times). Perrault became famous for fairy tales that include Cendrillon (Cinderella), Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (Little Red Riding Hood), and Le Chat Botté (Puss in Boots). His mythical folktale Blue Beard is about a murderous husband named Blue Beard who takes the bodies of his previous wives and entombs them in a chamber. This work by Perrault is one of the most used and appropriated fairy tales transferred to the cinema with innumerable direct adaptations and variations of the Blue Beard theme produced from the early silent era to the present.

Venezuelan-born filmmaker Sebastian Gutierrez's sleek and stylish Elizabeth Harvest (2018) is one of the latest iterations of the centuries-old tale. This techno-noir/sci-fi/horror hybrid tells the story of Henry Kollenberg (Ciarán Hinds; Game of Thrones, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2), a Nobel-winning scientist and millionaire, who's just returning from a honeymoon with his new bride, Elizabeth (Abbey Lee; Mad Max: Fury Road, The Neon Demon). It isn't clear what the couple has in common but Henry has swept Elizabeth away, driving her in his convertible on a winding mountainous road to his palatial and ultra-modern mansion. Greeting her are Henry's personal assistant, Claire (Carla Gugino, Gutierrez's significant other in real life), a younger and more attractive Mrs. Danvers, and the scientist's blind son, Oliver (Matthew Beard; The Imitation Game). Elizabeth is awed by the swank furniture, wide fireplace, Henry's master bedroom, and all the accoutrements, delicatessens, and wines that the house stores. "It's all yours," Henry tells his new wife. But there's one laboratory room in the basement that Henry classifies as the "forbidden room" since it contains his private work that Elizabeth must not access. All the rooms have biometric fingerprint readers (including the lab) but Henry insists she not trespass into that domain. Of course, when Henry leaves the next day for an unspecified work trip, Elizabeth is intrigued to discover what "forbidden fruit" lies therein and breaks into the lab. She finds what resembles more of a morgue with cryogenic chambers filled with amniotic fluid. She pulls one out and sees her clone lying in the chamber! After Henry returns, he soon learns (or senses) that Elizabeth has broken in, which leads to a Psycho moment.

Dazed bride and her millionaire chauffeur.

The next "chapter" of Elizabeth Harvest seems to do what a number of contemporary films attempt: show prior story events from alternate angles and different points of view. This segment does but a different Elizabeth enters the story's fray and turns the tables on Henry. The audience is also introduced to Logan (Dylan Baker; Happiness, Selma), a police detective and friend of Henry's who asks about the new wife but doesn't do enough snooping around himself. The middle of the film is a slow-burn as Matthew wants one of the Elizabeths to read him Claire's diary, which reveals secrets within Henry's lab. Gutierrez presents a surfeit of expository narration but he and cinematographer Cale Finot keep things visually interesting all throughout the film.

Model Abbey Lee has a glacial beauty about her, which doesn't really require her to act much, but she imbues the other Elizabeths with such subtle shadings and distinct manners that it requires the audience to pay full attention to every nuance in her performance. Ciarán Hinds is tremendous as her beastly husband. Carla Gugino and Matthew Beard initially seem so cool and detached but there are secrets simmering within them ready to be unleashed.

Elizabeth Harvest is gorgeous to look at but tonally, it has a cold and sterile mood amidst its architectural splendor that reminds me of analogous milieus in Kubrick's films. The mise-en-scène also sports a neo-giallo that pays tribute to Argento rather than ripping him off. There's also thematic links to de Palma's world, not to mention ingenious use of his split screens. Besides the homages that Gutierrez pays to the masters, Elizabeth Harvest is also worth seeing for the cautionary message it makes about harvesting biogenetics into humans. It could be argued that it does for that critical subject what Alex Garland's Ex Machina (2014) does for AI.

Elizabeth Harvest Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Scream Factory's release of Elizabeth Harvest comes with a slipcover on a BD-50 that uses the MPEG-4 AVC encode. Gutierrez's seventh feature appears in its original exhibition ratio of 2.40:1 (it was indeed shot with anamorphic lenses). The DI used for this transfer exhibits a polished and glossy image with no discernible digital artifacts. Authoring and compression could have been better, though, with a maxed-out bitrate. Scream encodes the transfer at an average video bitrate of 24989 kbps.

Gutierrez told the e-zine That Moment In that "color coding was written into the script as a way to identify the main emotion of each scene and to guide us through the back and forth shifts in time." In the making-of on this disc, director of photography Cale Finot explains that he employed four main colors to represent different emotions of the characters. For the present, the red is more amber but in flashbacks it boasts a "Wong Kar-wai red" that signals danger. In an interview with Kirill Grouchnikov of Pushing Pixels, production designer Diana Trujillo states that they also incorporated a lavender blue to aubergine purple tone for flashbacks. Screenshot #s 12-20 show the various tones of amber, green blue, and red. According to Trujillo, Elizabeth Harvest was filmed in Bogotá, Colombia across four different houses which used a couple stage sets for the bedroom and the lab.

The 109-minute feature receives the standard twelve scene selections.

Elizabeth Harvest Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Scream supplies a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 Surround (3078 kbps, 24-bit) and a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 downsample (1606 kbps, 24-bit) for the film's two sound tracks. I listened to both and prefer the 2.0 stereo mix for comprehending all the dialogue. The actors often murmur, mumble, and speak in a low tone so the downmix helps focalize the words along the front channels.

The 5.1 mix is optimal for hearing f/x and Rachel Zeffira's very diverse score. Zeffira, an oboist and member of the Cat's Eyes, employs a variety of musical colors to reflect the characters' states. The background female vocals are sung staccato and I think are meant to reflect Elizabeth's "inner voices." The movie also makes diegetic use of excerpts from French composer Erik Satie's Sarabande no.3, which Henry performs on piano.

I watched the feature with the optional English SDH and they're an accurate transcription of the spoken words.

Elizabeth Harvest Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• "Making of Elizabeth Harvest" Featurette (14:39, 1080p) - quite an informative EPK featurette with lots of behind-the-scenes footage showing cast and crew at work. We hear from writer/director Sebastian Gutierrez, co-producer Sandra Yee Ling, production designer Diana Trujillo, cinematographer Cale Finot, as well as actors Ciarán Hinds, Abbey Lee, Carla Gugino, and Matthew Beard. All interviewees speak in English (not subtitled).

• Theatrical Trailer (1:52, 1080p) - IFC Films' original trailer for Elizabeth Harvest presented in 2.40:1 with DTS-HD MA 2.0 stereo.

• Previews - trailers for The 12th Man (1:37, 1080p) Wildling (2:17, 1080p), and Mary Shelley (2:09, 1080p) load in succession before the menu of Elizabeth Harvest loads.

Elizabeth Harvest Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Elizabeth Harvest is a visually dazzling multi-genre picture that I watched twice in the same day. It's a jigsaw puzzle that can only be pieced together once you figure out which strand fits where and then must be re-interpreted. Scream Factory delivers a visually ravishing transfer and two complementary lossless audio tracks. The relatively brief making-of doc is actually very good but could easily be expanded for at least another hour. The DE Blu-ray from Concorde Video is similar to Scream's and also includes a couple German dubs. I would have liked to hear more interviews and get a commentary from Gutierrez but this standard edition still comes STRONGLY RECOMMENDED.