6.5 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
Police arrive at an abandoned gas station following a brutal massacre. The only evidence at the crime scene is the victims’ personal electronic devices, including a camcorder, flip Cam, and two cell phones. With nothing else to go on, a detective must analyze the bits of "found footage" to piece together the identity of the killer.
Starring: Stephen Moyer, Radha Mitchell, Torrey DeVitto, Svetlana Metkina, Dale DickeyHorror | 100% |
Thriller | 61% |
Crime | Insignificant |
Mystery | 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 SDH, Spanish
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Slipcover in original pressing
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 2.5 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 0.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
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 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.
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.
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 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.
מי מפחד מהזאב הרע / Mi mefakhed mehaze'ev hara
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