Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.0

Evidence Blu-ray Movie Review

Criminal Reconstruction

Reviewed by Michael Reuben August 15, 2013

Director Olatunde Osunsanmi gained modest attention with The Fourth Kind, a film allegedly about alien abduction but really about gamesmanship with illusion and reality, in which Milla Jovovich introduces herself to the camera as an actress playing the lead. The independent film Evidence extends Osunsanmi's hall-of-mirrors approach into the world of "found video" pioneered by The Blair Witch Project, but with an angle that, for at least a while, adds a potentially intriguing twist to an overused device. In the script by John Swetnam (expanding on an earlier short he directed himself), the "found video" isn't just a stylistic quirk; it really has been found at a crime scene, and it's being watched by police investigators and technicians who are trying to discover what happened. As they piece together the story, so does the audience. It's like CSI, but with pixels instead of viscera.

Evidence received enough theatrical distribution in July 2013 for my colleague, Brian Orndorf, to review it, but it must not have been much of a release, since no receipts are listed at Box Office Mojo. The film is clearly aimed at the home video market, because much of the imagery is meant to blur the boundaries between the story and your TV screen. The footage being reviewed by the police has been severely damaged, and the picture and sound are constantly distorting, breaking up and cutting out. In a theater, you would be aware of the deliberate artifice, but on your own viewing screen, it is often indistinguishable from a defective disc or faulty equipment. By this sly and rather nefarious route, Osunsanmi manages to tap into the reserves of anxiety that every home theater enthusiast harbors over the health of their hardware and software, and the director uses it to intensify the reaction to whatever frights his film is able to muster (which, it must be acknowledged, aren't many).

Evidence opens with a swooping aerial shot that doesn't look quite right. The reason becomes evident as the camera's eye pushes in on the smoking wreckage of a derelict gas station, where police and forensic technicians are gathering evidence. The scene is a photorealistic computer simulation, the kind of CG marvel that permits a virtual "camera" to dart in and around individual figures, circling them with the ease of an omnipotent Steadicam operator. The camera pauses with deliberate attention on specific sights that will be important later, including a severed arm and a welder's mask. The date, according to onscreen titles, is July 27, 2012, and the location is Kidwell, Nevada, 72 miles from Las Vegas.

In the city, Det. Burquez (Radha Mitchell) evades the questions of journalists, then retires to the police station's sleek video analysis suite run by hi-tech guru Gabe (Barak Hadley). She is stunned to encounter Det. Reese (Stephen Moyer, True Blood's vampire Bill), who is supposed to be on leave, for reasons that are not explained until late in the film. He has learned from news reports that substantial video footage was recovered at a scene of multiple homicides, and video analysis is his specialty. He wants to be part of the team.

The bulk of Evidence involves Reese, Burquez, Gabe and Officer Jenson (Aml Ameen) sifting through the damaged footage from video cameras and cell phones, attempting to discover the identity of a killer who stalked his victims at the garage with his face concealed by the welder's mask discovered at the scene. The saga begins innocently enough with an outing to Las Vegas by two roommates from L.A., Leann (Torrey DeVitto) and Rachel (Caitlin Stasey), with Leann's boyfriend, Tyler (Nolan Gerard Funk). Leann is an aspiring actress, and Rachel is an aspiring filmmaker who always has a video camera in her hands. The earliest footage records Leann's rehearsals for a play and her debut performance, at the end of which Tyler made the ill-considered move of proposing to her on stage in front of an audience, only to be crushed when she said no. But he accompanied them on the Vegas trip nonetheless, because the trip was planned and the tickets were paid for.

Along the way, other passengers appear in the shuttle bus carrying this uneasy trio. One of them is Vicki (Svetlana Metkina), who is carrying a "private" present to her young son, which turns out to be a second video camera (or is it?). Another is Katrina Fleischman (Dale Dickey, also a True Blood regular), who, upon close analysis of individual video frames, is shown to be carrying a large quantity of cash. She turns out to have military connections. A third passenger is a teenager, Steven (Albert Kuo), who says he's running away from a bad situation at home.

On what sounds like a pretext—supposedly there's another passenger to be picked up in Kidwell—the bus driver, Ben (Harry Lennix from Dollhouse), takes them onto deserted back roads, where the vehicle becomes disabled. That's how the group ends up at the abandoned gas station where the mayhem begins. Deciphering who is doing what to whom, and how, becomes a challenge, especially since the bodies recovered at the scene are burned beyond recognition. An even bigger question is why. Det. Burquez concludes that the travelers crossed paths with a previously undetected serial killer.

Evidence's "video recovery" is intriguing for a while, especially while characters are being introduced and the police are actively finding clues in the corrupted datastream. But it eventually grows tiresome, as screenwriter Swetnam exhausts his ideas for clues that can be pulled out of strays bits in the images and enhanced to reveal more of the story. There's not much suspense in watching long stretches of video contaminated by breakup, dropout, banding, noise, distortion and interruption, especially when you know it's been done deliberately by the filmmakers to conceal information and prevent the viewer from learning the truth.

An additional casualty of this emphasis on "bad" video is the reduction of screen time for the detectives played by Moyer and Mitchell, who are by far the most compelling presences among the cast. They can generate more intrigue in thirty seconds of verbal sparring than the rest of the cast (even the usually impressive Harry Lennix) manages in ten minutes of artfully damaged "shaky cam" filled with fire, smoke and screams. As the video footage grinds on, the viewer is left with too much down time to think about gaps in the story and the possible identity of the killer. No director should leave an audience that kind of breathing room if he wants to pull off any kind of surprise.

Evidence Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Evidence was shot by Swiss cameraman Lukas Ettlin, whose credits include The Lincoln Lawyer and Battle Los Angeles, but the cinematography for a film of this nature seems almost secondary. It's the visual effects designed by Andrew Somers that dominate the frame, because so much of the film is composed of video that has to look like it's been damaged by accident. As I noted in the introduction, the experience of watching Evidence can be unnerving if you've ever had a damaged disc or a failing Blu-ray player. How does one evaluate the "accuracy" of the Blu-ray's reproduction of intentional distortion?

At least for those scenes involving the police, the picture on Image/RLJ Entertainment's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray is sharp, detailed and free of noise, with solid blacks and appropriately saturated colors. But there's not much to see in these sections: mostly the entrance to the police station, a few nondescript rooms and the sterile video recovery suite where the investigators watch the recovered footage. As for the damaged video, some of it is "night vision" black-and-white, but most of it is in color, with varying degrees of saturation, depending on illumination. The copious breakups and image fragmentation are sometimes more colorful than the image itself, and gore hounds will be disappointed by the lack of vivid reds and the general absence of detailed carnage—but that isn't the Blu-ray's fault.

Given the deliberately faulty visual texture, a host of artifacts could be hidden in the Blu-ray's image, and a viewer would never notice. But at 94 minutes with no extras, and with an average bitrate of 23.98 Mbps, I doubt that compression issues were there to be noticed.

Evidence Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

From the opening moments of the film, when composer Atli Örvarsson's (Vantage Point) score throbs into the lower registers, Evidence's DTS-HD MA 5.1 track alerts the viewer to expect an experience with deep bass extension and peaks that are loud. It's a warning that should be taken seriously. Some of the video breakups are accompanied by sharp, ear-piercing bursts of noise that, if you're in the habit of listening at reference level, may be more than you want to hear. Since much of Evidence plays out in the recovered video, the bulk of the sound mix remains in the front, but the sound distortions expand through the surround array, and their impact can be startling.

The dialogue among the police in always clear, while the dialogue in the video sequences is by turns clear and muffled. Even when it's muffled, it's generally intelligible, mixed in with a lot of background noise. What's there is meant to be understood, and the mixing has been done with care to preserve audibility while maintaining the illusion that the recording is damaged.

Evidence Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The disc has no extras. At startup, it plays trailers for The Numbers Station, The Tall Man and The Colony, which can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are not otherwise available once the disc loads.

Evidence Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Evidence is an interesting idea, but the script is underdeveloped, and the final product should be much better than it is. Don't be lured by the prominent use of Moyer and Mitchell in the promotional campaign. They're good when they're used, but they're not the stars. A rental is your best bet.