Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.0

Greta Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Martin Liebman June 3, 2019

Loneliness and psychosis make for a dangerous combination, and those qualities are the heart of Director Neil Jordan's (The Crying Game, The Brave One) Greta, a mundane Thriller about an older woman obsessing over a young lady. The film fails to bring anything new to the table, trudging through tired machinations, trite plot points, and routine character arcs. The film plays through a predicable series of events that are highlighted by...nothing, really. A skim of any plot synopsis pretty much tells the entire story; any halfway savvy movie fan will know exactly how it's going to play out. It's not necessarily bad -- it's technically well made and nicely performed -- but viewers searching for a movie with some bite and novelty will walk away disappointed having experienced a very pedestrian movie.

Frances McCullen (Chloë Grace Moretz) is an everyday, garden variety sort of girl looking for her place in the world after her mother's death. She's working a good job as a waitress at a posh restaurant and comes home to a comfortable apartment and a good friend and roommate, Erica (Maika Monroe). She takes the subway to work everyday. Her routine is a little bit upended when she finds an abandoned handbag. She dutifully returns it to its rightful owner, an older woman she comes to know as Greta Hideg (Isabelle Huppert). Greta's own daughter is living out of the country. The two quickly form a bond of friendship; Frances sees in her a mother figure and Greta a companion filling the void vacated by her daughter. But when Frances discovers a disturbing secret about her new friend, she tries to cut ties. Greta will have none of it, relentlessly stalking the young woman. The police can do nothing about it, even as Greta's actions become ever more daring and dangerous.

Jordan, who co-wrote the film with Ray Wright, creates a slow-burn experience in a classic structure that introduces character and dynamics at a slow drip pace. When he pulls back the veil -- Frances discovering that she did not find Greta's handbag by accident -- it's a sudden reveal meant to shock the audience as deeply as it rightly shocks and affects Frances. Unfortunately, on a dramatic construction level, the moment falls flat. Unless the audience is going into the movie blindly or naively, there's no feel for that same shock. Frances feels it, sure, but for the audience, by way of reading that pesky plot summary, viewing a trailer, or simply through movie muscle memory, it's an expectedly essential detail that falls flat. Jordan does nothing to invigorate the moment, to shake things up. The film follows a fairly trite Domestic Thriller structure whereby the story begins with everyone happy and everything hunky-dory until it turns darker as it goes through the structural permutations featuring Greta stalking Frances (and eventually her roommate as a means of getting to Frances) and leading, of course, to the obligatorily violent showdown that, if nothing else, does reinforce Greta's level of psychosis when she all but brushes off a serious wound.

To its credit, the cast works hard to find something in the material that the script doesn't create: characters with souls. None of these are particularly engaging individuals. There's nothing about Frances, certainly, that makes her character an attractive case study, despite a few notes that include a recently deceased mother and a strained relationship with her father. Her mother's recent death is obviously the open door for Greta, who sees a mental vulnerability to feed her psychosis, but Chloë Grace Moretz can't substantially build on what's not there and Frances is simply too one dimensional to be of value for the audience beyond the basic rooting interest. Isabelle Huppert plays the more compelling character, Greta, who has built up a persona and web of lies to lure her victims into her home and heart and eventually somewhere darker and deeper. But she's sloppy; she leaves her handbag collection not in plain sight but not behind lock-and-key either, begging the question of whether she wanted to be found out by one of her victims or not. Either way, it's a bland excuse for the break and the subsequent stalking. The movie leaves much of Greta's psychosis to the imagination; Huppert toys with ideas aplenty and proves more than capable of digging deeply both internally and externally, subtly and bluntly, but the script often leaves the audience asking more questions than the movie answers, which does add to the level of intrigue and fear factor, what little of those the film manages to create in the first place.

Greta Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

For Greta, Universal has released a perfectly well rounded Blu-ray via the original digitally sourced photography. The image presents city details, exteriors to be sure but also interiors -- apartments, restaurants, coffee bars -- with ease; the city landscapes come alive as characters live in them, traverse through them, and struggle in their clutches. Characters are revealed with screen-commanding definition. Intimate pores, lines, and makeup details are readily visible, and clothing details are sharp and precise. The film's color palette maintains a pleasing neutrality. The Blu-ray reveals every shade, from warm apartment and restaurant interiors to more brightly lit exteriors, with flawless expertise. Skin tones are true and black levels raise no alarms. Noise is light and there are no other source or encode maladies worth noting. While the image is in no way astonishing in 2019, it's pleasing in its stability and dependability.

Greta Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Even underneath the open's soft, nicely spaced music, there's a feel for the bustle in an underground subway station in the film's opening seconds and a packed, classy restaurant (the same where Frances works) moments later. It's an auspicious beginning that hints at the well-rounded DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 lossless soundtrack Universal has on tap. A bar in chapter nine is also one of the more lively, thriving sonic environments in the film. But here-and-there din is not the highlight. The track finds its most prodigious sonic explosion in chapter 14 when an elevator closes in on a character, with a symphony of shattering glass and twisting metal crunching and suffocating a character, and the listener. The film's few hectic scenes blend more intense music and high yield sound effects to near perfection, particularly later in the movie when various slams and crashes shape several elements within the climax. A few good directional effects are on offer as well, such as a phone ringing off to the side in chapter nine or a metronome rocking back and forth in chapter 17. Dialogue is the track's mainstay. It enjoys a natural home in the front-center channel. It is effortlessly detailed and well prioritized.

Greta Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

This Blu-ray release of Greta includes only a featurette and deleted scenes. A Movies Anywhere digital copy code is included with purchase. This release ships with an embossed slipcover.

• Deleted Scenes (1080p, 5:45 total runtime): Included are Onions; Not Fair, Morton; The Whole World Is Your Oyster; Frances Walks Home; Frances Looks for Answers; Please Don't Ever Come Back Here; Where Is Frances?; Talking to the Cops; and Out of Embalming Powder.
• Greta: Enemies and Friends (1080p, 3:33): Cast and crew quickly recount the plot and characters, intercut with rapid-fire clips from the film.

Greta Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Greta is a fairly dry Thriller with little creativity in its arsenal. It plays out via predicable machinations that altogether build a perfectly watchable, but ultimately forgettable, film. Chloë Grace Moretz's work is admirable in shaping an otherwise shapeless character, and the film seems content to leave much of Isabelle Huppert's title character to the imagination. This decent time-killer does feature good Blu-ray video and audio. Supplements include a handful of deleted scenes and a brief featurette. Rent it.