6.9 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
A film adaptation of the play by Peter Shaffer, Equus stars Richard Burton as Martin Dysart, a psychiatrist who takes on an unusual case: a young stable boy (Peter Firth) who, in frenzy, has blinded six horses. Their sessions reveal that the boy has a quasi-religious fetish for horses and he rides them in the dead of night, experiencing an ecstasy unlike anything Dysart has ever known. Dysart begins to question: Is the pursuit of normalcy worth the loss of individual passions?
Starring: Richard Burton, Peter Firth, Jenny Agutter, Joan Plowright, Colin BlakelyDrama | 100% |
Psychological thriller | 2% |
Mystery | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio Mono (48kHz, 24-bit)
Music: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0
English SDH
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
It’s almost always tricky to adapt a stage success to the screen, as countless failed or flawed attempts prove. Screenwriters typically like to “open things up”, in the parlance of cinema, introducing a sense of locale and, frankly, production values that are typically not the common currency of theatrical enterprises, especially plays (as opposed to musicals). But Equus, the thrilling if incredibly intellectual enterprise penned by Peter Shaffer in 1973, was an especially sticky wicket to conquer. The original stage piece played out with virtually no set and further utilized a patently theatrical (in every sense of that term) conceit wherein people donned horse heads to become various equines. There was therefore a ritualistic aspect to the stage production, one that closely mirrored allusions to religion and ritual throughout the play itself, and trying to recreate that mythic environment for the medium of film was probably a fool’s errand. A lot of people have taken the film version of Equus to task for more or less completely missing the point of the play, delivering instead a “lowest common denominator” approach that tends to focus more on the roiling inner worlds of a tormented youth and the equally troubled analyst who is trying to help him than on any of the subtext that Shaffer packed so intricately into his writing. I’d tend to make a somewhat different point while not entirely disagreeing with that sentiment. As anyone who has seen a “filmed play” will attest, there’s an instantaneous distance and artificiality to such a tack that makes entering the story and the characters an often daunting task. The fact is Equus as a play merged a ceremonial, even sacramental, ethos with an incredibly naturalistic exploration of two characters and it was from that dialectic that the piece’s immense power derived. There was probably no simple way to try to cleanly matriculate the original into film form, but Shaffer, adapting his own play, tends to toe a middle ground that, if not completely successful, is often startlingly vivid and moving. There’s absolutely no denying that the film offers incredible showcases for stars Richard Burton as psychiatrist Martin Dysart and Peter Firth, in a truly astounding performance reprising his stage roles (in London and New York) as teenager Alan Strang, a boy with a lifelong obsession with horses whose fascination with the beasts has recently been tinged with a horrifying tragedy.
Equus is presented on Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. This is a virtually flawless transfer that offers a beautifully organic experience which reproduces the lustrous shadow drenched cinematography of the legendary Oswald Morris. While there are some brightly lit outdoor sequences, moments when colors pop quite vividly and the image's sharpness is excellent, a lot of this film is bathed in an almost chiaroscuro look, especially in some of the film's most effective moments, when Alan takes nighttime rides. Contrast is solid across all light situations, offering excellent shadow detail in even extremely dim scenes. Lumet favors extreme close-ups quite a bit of the time (some are shown in the screenshots accompanying this review), and those reveal excellent fine detail in everything from Alan's disheveled hair to Dysart's tweedy jackets. There are a couple of minor though noticeable anomalies, including a momentary warping at around the 16:39 mark, moments which aren't of any major import but which will be apparent to ardent videophiles.
Equus' lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono mix nicely recreates the film's original soundtrack, delivering what is ultimately a pretty dialogue heavy film with excellent fidelity. Richard Rodney Bennett's minimal score and some of the horse foley effects all sound just fine as well, with excellent reproduction of all frequency ranges. The track shows no damage of any kind.
Make no mistake about it, if you really want to experience Equus in all its multilayered majesty, it's essential that you see it in a well directed and mounted (no pun intended) stage production. But I'm not one of those who decries how Shaffer and Lumet chose to saunter this piece into the medium of film. Does it always work? No. But does it still retain some of the essential power of the original stage piece? Absolutely. The film certainly is a worthwhile, and even devastating, experience, one which documents two remarkable performances by Burton and Firth. This Blu-ray's technical merits are outstanding and Equus comes Highly recommended.
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