Lovecraft Country: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.0

Lovecraft Country: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 4, 2021

While there have admittedly been several, there haven’t been a ton of Blu-ray releases of films or other properties either based on the works of or featuring an at least tangential connection to H.P. Lovecraft. That said, more than one have crossed my personal review queue over the years, including such widely disparate efforts as Bride of Re- Animator, Beyond Re-Animator, Dagon, Incident in a Ghostland (note that the link points to a Region B release from the United Kingdom), and Die, Monster, Die!. In some of the reviews of those releases, I’ve mentioned the difficulties encountered by those attempting to define exactly what a “Lovecraftian” story might be, and in that regard, Lovecraft Country would probably qualify as one of the more audacious efforts which alludes to Lovecraft. Based on a 2016 novel by Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country reinvents aspects of the Lovecraft mythos within a tale of mid-century racism in the United States that focuses on a black man named Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors), a veteran returned from the Korean War, who is initially on the hunt for his missing father as the story opens.

Without mentioning any outright spoilers, there are certain plot developments at play in this first season of Lovecraft Country which are kind of oddly similar, at least in passing, to elements in American Gods: Season 1, both in terms of a central black character with a mysterious past, and perhaps especially with regard to that character’s relationship to his (quasi?-) romantic partner, in this case a woman named Letitia Lewis (Jurnee Smollett). Both Leti (as she's called) in this series and Shadow Moon's wife in American Gods share a perhaps rather distinctive trait which won't be overtly mentioned, but which will be instantly apparent to anyone who's seen both series. That said, this series’ Lovecraftian subtext might suggest that it’s American Demons rather than Gods who are lurking in the shadows. There’s a “quest” aspect including a kind of “on the road” conceit in the show which may also remind some of American Gods.

In what is almost an unavoidably ironic dialectic, the fact that Lovecraft Country may also recall a series rather different from American Gods, namely HBO's so-called "limited series" Watchmen (for reasons which will be discussed in a moment), may give rise to the simultaneous apprehension that Lovecraft Country is both sui generis and oddly referential at times to wildly disparate properties. In terms of the connection to Watchmen, it might be best summarized as saying that both shows attempt to deal with what I might generically call "racial justice" issues, albeit in bizarrely unexpected contexts. Lovecraft Country is also explicitly tethered to Watchmen in its own "reassessment" of the horrors of what is often referred to as the "Tulsa race massacre".

There are references to "pulpy" stories both within the show and even on the back cover of this release, but I'm not sure that adjective, kind of like Lovecraftian itself, really applies to a story that ends up dealing with magical cults, time travel, alternate realities and, you know, occasional cthonic specimen. In terms of the whole Lovecraft creature effort, one thing I did notice about the show structurally is how it tends to exploit its personal dramas for much of any given episode, only to finally tip over into ooey, gooey monsters and the like. That may signal a certain awkwardness in terms of the weirdly clashing plot elements at play in this series, but it's also handled rather remarkably well a lot of the time. There are even other, perhaps slightly more subliminal, disjunctions at play in the series which may in fact occasionally chafe, including lots of relatively contemporary source cues utilized, supposedly done I'm assuming to provide "counterpoint" (pun I guess unavoidable) to the visuals.

Lovecraft Country: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Lovecraft Country: The Complete First Season is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of HBO and Warner Brothers Home Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. While the IMDb discloses a 4K DI, it doesn't list a camera, but your intrepid reviewer found this really interesting interview with cinematographer Michael Watson, where he discloses that after shooting the pilot with Arri Alexas, he moved on to the Sony Venice, shooting 60 fps at a native 6K resolution. The results are frequently staggering, with a beautiful array of precise looking textures on everything from costume fabrics to practical props to even, perhaps surprisingly, some of the fleeting glimpses of CGI (one hopes, anyway) creatures. There are a number of intentionally graded sequences, including some in rather deep cobalt blues, but detail levels are routinely commendable. One minor deficit is a swath of really dark material that runs through several episodes, as evidenced by some of the screenshots in positions 15 through 19. While there is understandably less overall detail in some of these moments, and I might argue that given the spectacular look of much of the rest of this presentation, shadow definition might have been at least incrementally improved at times.

Lovecraft Country: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Lovecraft Country: The Complete First Season features a nicely robust DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that gets off to an impressively booming start courtesy of a kind of "battle" scene Atticus finds himself in. While the monster aspect typically plays out in vignette driven snippets, there are some really impressive effects utilized at various moments, as in the case of a kind of vampire chasing Leti through a forest in one episode. Outdoor material also offers regular engagement of the side and rear channels. Dialogue is presented cleanly and clearly throughout this problem free track. Optional subtitles in a variety of languages are available.

Lovecraft Country: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Orithyia Blue and the Imagination of Diana Freeman (1080p; 11:20) addresses just one of several "meta" aspects this series offers, in this case a character in a sort of graphic novel written by a character in the show.


• Lovecraft Country: Compendium of Horrors (1080p; 12:26) looks at some of the more Gothic elements of the show.


• Crafting Lovecraft Country (1080p; 28:14) is a nice, more in depth, piece that looks at the production side.


• Exploring Lovecraft Country offers brief interviews with the following performers:

  Aujanue Ellis (1080p; 1:02)

  
  

  Abbey Lee (1080p; 1:00)

  
  

  Courtney B. Vance (1080p; 1:02)

  
  

  Jada Harris (1080p; 1:01)

  
  

  Jonathan Majors (1080p; 1:02)

  
  

  Jurnee Smollett (1080p; 1:02)

  
  

  Michael Kenneth Williams (1080p; 1:02)

  
  

  Wunmi Mosaku (1080p; 1:02)

• Lovecraft Country The Craft does much the same service for various crew members:

  Afua Richardson (1080p; 2:01)

  
  

  Eric Yamamoto (1080p; 1:02)

  
  

  Carey Jones (1080p; 2:01)

  
  

  JP Jones (1080p; 1:55)

Note: All of the above supplements can be found on Disc Three of this three disc set.

Lovecraft Country: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Just to give one more indication of how bizarrely wide admittedly subliminal referents to this show can include, there's one episode in Lovecraft Country's first season that could realistically be described as offering the "flip side" to what happens to the central character in the recently reviewed Watermelon Man (note that this is another Region B disc). The juxtaposition of a story dealing at least in part with race with allusions both overt and covert to H.P. Lovecraft might seem odd, but as the show itself gets into, albeit a bit discursively at times, Lovecraft himself had a rather controversial history with race and racism. That's just one of many layers to this frequently completely audacious enterprise. I'm frankly not sure everything works here, and I found some of the repetitiveness of the episode structures to be a bit of a slog, but this is another outstanding effort from HBO, at least for those willing to surrender to an admittedly very peculiar premise. Technical merits are solid, and the supplementary package very enjoyable. Recommended.