Mare of Easttown Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.5

Mare of Easttown Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 18, 2021

Mare of Easttown is one of those shows where a sweet young mother with an adorable tot is shown early on, and those with a "Spidey sense" about how murder mysteries play out may be silently praying to themselves, "Please don't let her be the victim, please don't let her be the victim". Alas, prayers like that will go unanswered in this involving peek behind the (dowdy) curtain in a semi-rural Pennsylvania enclave on the perimeter of Philadelphia. Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet) is a put upon sergeant on the local constabulary force, who, as the miniseries opens, is awoken from her sleep because everyone in Easttown evidently knows who she is and has her number, and she's been called by a worried elderly neighbor about an ostensible peeping Tom. This opening vignette offers a quick allusion to a local news article about Mare that is running on the front page of the local paper that day, and while many viewers will of course assume it's a story about her police work, instead it turns out that it's a retrospective about Mare's leadership during a high school basketball tournament a quarter of a century ago which led to an unexpected state championship.

This is another HBO miniseries that offers a compelling mystery element which nonetheless may ultimately give way to too many red herrings and, frankly, too many (ultimate) culprits. In this way and some others which I'm about to detail, this piece reminded me at times quite strongly of Sharp Objects. Both of these HBO properties also offer a troubled woman looking into the possible abduction and/or murder of young(ish) girls/women, and both feature relatively isolated communities where, as I mentioned in our Sharp Objects Blu-ray review, "everybody knows your name (and your business)". And in fact, kind of also similarly to Sharp Objects, Mare of Easttown may be just a bit too incestuous in terms of offering up a relatively limited supply of townspeople whose lives are perhaps too conveniently intertwined.

These perhaps niggling points aside, Mare of Easttown is a rather bracing look at several characters in various states of transition, and it doles out its revelations with a decent amount of impact. There's actually a rather disturbing denouement fairly early on vis a vis one assumed victim which gives the rest of the miniseries a definitely angst ridden undertone. The supporting cast of the miniseries all offer really memorable portraits. Jean Smart as Mare's mother Helen delivers another really interesting performance, in one of those kind of quietly showy "de- glammed" portraits. And in fact just about all of the women in this piece go the "de-glammed" route, including Winslet of course and also Julianne Nicholson as Lori, Mare's BFF.

There are a couple of interwoven mysteries at play in the story, with Mare getting professionally taken to task for not having solved the mysterious disappearance of a young girl a year previously, something that soon invites the suppposedly supervisory appearance of a county detective named Zabel (Evan Peters). When that aforementioned sweet young mother subsequently shows up dead, the two have dual tasks on their hands. In the meantime, all sorts of personal drama surround Mare play out, including some history with her ex-husband Frank (David Denman), and the pair's deceased son whose wife (Sosie Bacon) is nursing a heroin addiction while supposedly raising Mare's grandchild. Mare also becomes involved with a visiting writer named Richard Ryan (Guy Pearce), and ultimately there's almost a quasi-ménage à trois as Mare finds herself pursued by both Ryan and Zabel, in plot developments that struck me as not absolutely necessary to the forward momentum of the story.

Mare of Easttown may ultimately succeed more as a performance piece (or set of performances piece) than as an actual mystery, especially considering what, again rather like Sharp Objects, turns out to be a cascade of late breaking revelations which almost comically switch perceived guilt from character to character. But the honesty of the performances really helps the miniseries to elide some of these more potentially preposterous seeming elements, and there's a really palpable claustrophobia to the small town aspect of the tale that is quite expertly handled.

Mare of Easttown Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Mare of Easttown is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of HBO and Warner Brothers Home Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.00:1. The IMDb lists the Arri Alexa Mini and a 2K DI as relevant data points. This is an interesting looking presentation a lot of the time, though it does tend to suffer a bit from what I've termed "Alexa murk" in some of the dimly lit interior scenes, many of which have been graded toward yellow tones. Otherwise, though, detail levels are consistently strong, even throughout the miniseries' tendency to feature things like dusky twilight scenes. Even some relatively brightly lit outdoor material has a certain autumnal or wintry feel, and as such the palette tends to be pretty tamped down quite a bit of the time. As tends to be the case with offerings from HBO and/or Warner, I noticed no compression issues of any major import.

Mare of Easttown Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Mare of Easttown features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that derives quite a bit of immersive value from mundane, even drab, ambient environmental effects which nonetheless help to create a realistic soundstage through which characters pass. There's a glut of outdoor material in the miniseries which aids and abets good placement of effects, and the effective if ponderous score from Lele Marchitelli also spreads nicely through the side and rear channels. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout. Optional subtitles in several languages are available.

Mare of Easttown Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Disc Two of this two disc set offers a minimal supply of bonus features, which have been kind of randomly split into separate short featurettes, all of them offering different edits from the same interviews.

• Invitation to the Set (HD; 2:21) offers a lot of candid footage, and includes interviews with Kate Winslet, among others.


• Welcome to Easttown (HD; 3:20) offers more of Winslet and other talking heads discussing some of the location work.


• Mare of Easttown: A Closer Look (HD; 2:52) is a brief overview with more interview snippets with Winslet and others.


• Making Mare of Easttown (HD; 8:39) is relatively substantial and again features Winslet and others talking about the production. There's some especially interesting if frustratingly brief information about the dialect coaching the actors underwent.

Mare of Easttown Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Mare of Easttown has racked up a generous supply of Emmy nominations, including for Winslet, Peters, Smart and Nicholson in various acting categories, and it has already brought home a trophy for Outstanding Production Design for a Narrative Contemporary Program (One Hour or More), in the separately announced Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards. The glut of acting nominations may point subliminally to the fact that Mare of Easttown may be more viscerally compelling in terms of its performances than for the mystery (and/or mysteries) it proffers. Technical merits are solid, and Mare of Easttown comes Recommended.