6.7 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Newlywed Elizabeth arrives with her brilliant scientist husband Henry to his magnificent estate, where he wows her with lavish dinners and a dazzling tour of the property. The house staff Claire and Oliver (Matthew Beard) treat her deferentially but she can't shake the feeling something is off. Henry explains that everything in his world now belongs to her, all is for her to play in - all except for a locked-off room he forbids her from entering. When he goes away for business, Elizabeth decides to investigate.
Starring: Carla Gugino, Ciarán Hinds, Dylan Baker, Matthew Beard, Abbey LeeHorror | 100% |
Thriller | Insignificant |
Sci-Fi | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 (48kHz, 24-bit)
BDInfo
English SDH, Spanish
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Slipcover in original pressing
Region A (C untested)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 1.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
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.
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.
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 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.
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