Shadow Dancer Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		5.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.5

Shadow Dancer Blu-ray Movie Review

Stepping Lightly

Reviewed by Michael Reuben August 18, 2013

Shadow Dancer is an espionage thriller, but it's nothing like the jittery action films that audiences have come to expect from the genre. Director James Marsh has a documentary background, and his style is a that of a traditional reporter. He observes, then shapes his observations into a narrative. That Marsh is exceptionally gifted in this pursuit can be seen in his Oscar-winning 2008 documentary, Man on Wire.

Marsh brings the same observational approach to fiction films, which made him an ideal match for Tom Bradby's screen adaptation of his 1998 novel of the same name. Bradby is a journalist, who spent three years as a correspondent covering the Northern Ireland peace process and the 1994 IRA ceasefire. The novel Shadow Dancer was Bradby's way of recording what he could not express in news dispatches about negotiating positions and the death throes of a movement devoted to violent revolt. He wanted to explore the conflicting allegiances and confused emotions that daily tore at individuals trapped inside a conflict they did not create but inherited as a kind of bloody birthright. It is at precisely the moment when peace finally seems possible that those conflicts can become most unbearable for some individuals, because the world they have always known is ending.

The star of Shadow Dancer is Andrea Riseborough, whom American audiences saw recently as Tom Cruise's co-worker and shipmate in Oblivion. Riseborough's remarkable performance is the glue that binds Shadow Dancer, as Marsh's camera returns again and again to her expressive features, which simultaneously reveal deep emotion and conceal vital secrets.

In a prologue set in Belfast in 1973, we are introduced to the McVeigh family, when daughter Collette (Maria Laird) is just a child. On a seemingly ordinary day, something sends people in the street running for cover. The McVeigh family suffers a terrible loss. We are left to surmise the impact on each family member, but it is clear that young Collette blames herself.

Twenty years later, the adult Collette (Riseborough) is riding the London Underground, where she leaves an innocuous looking package on a train. Exiting the system by a hazardous and circuitous route, she is grabbed by two men in plain clothes and hussled off to a nondescript room occupied by a man she will come to know as "Mac" (Clive Owen). He tells her that the bombing attempt failed (which comes as no surprise to Collette, for reasons best left for the viewer to discover), but that they have her cold on terrorism charges. She can go to prison for twenty-five years or become an informant. Mac doesn't hesitate to use Collette's son as leverage. With no father in the picture—Collette is unmarried and the father is never identified—her son will go into foster care.

Under immense pressure, Collette accepts Mac's deal and returns to Ireland. But the main targets of her spying are her own brothers, Gerry (Aidan Gillen) and Connor (Domhnall Gleeson, who bears a strong resemblance to his father, actor Brendan Gleeson). Unrepentant IRA fanatics, Gerry and Connor have no interest in the unfolding peace process, which plays out on TV screens in the background throughout the film. Their group is Mac's target, and at first he seems unconcerned about the potential volatility of using their sister as a turncoat.

Collette chafes at her obligations as an informant and tries to learn as little as possible. She is more concerned with her obviously troubled son, Mark (Cathal Macguire), who resents his mother's absences, even though his grandmother, Collette's mother (Bríd Brennan), takes good care of him. Collette also knows she's in danger, because the IRA liaison, Kevin (Kevin Wilmot), keeps pressing her for details about what went wrong in London.

Tensions escalate when Gerry and Connor plan an assassination, and Connor lets word of it slip to Collette. She gives Mac a speck of information when he has her hauled in by the local police and threatens to revoke their deal. The attack does not go off as planned, and Kevin becomes convinced that someone close to the McVeigh brothers (or one of the brothers themselves) is a traitor.

Aware of Collette's danger, Mac wants to remove her immediately but is blocked by his icy superior, Kate Fletcher (Gillian Anderson). The woman hasn't done enough for us yet, says Fletcher. Mac now suspects that both he and Collette are pawns in a bigger game. He begins quietly poking through computer files of Belfast operations and finds a locked one named "Shadow Dancer". As Mac continues to investigate, his own loyalties become compromised.

Shadow Dancer is about people who are forced to make impossible choices. Both Mac and Collette have to make such choices by the film's end, and their choices don't exactly line up. Director Marsh forgoes violence for anxiety, the kind that comes when people know their world is one where violence can erupt at any moment, then vanish in an instant, leaving an indelible scar. It's the kind of world where, when you walk into a meeting, someone has laid out a pistol and a heavy-duty plastic drop cloth, in case the meeting doesn't turn out well.

Shadow Dancer Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Shadow Dancer was shot on 35mm film by Rob Hardy, who did the beautiful 16mm photography on Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974. As Marsh explains in the extras, he and Hardy aimed for a "classical" style without excessive camera movement. They also seem to have taken great care to "flatten" the image, so that the typical modern habit of popping objects out of the frame, either by lighting or by color choices, is absent from Shadow Dancer. The eye isn't automatically told what is or isn't important in a shot, and in long shots with copious detail, the effect can be unsettling (which was no doubt the intended result).

Magnolia's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray is a superb rendition of Hardy's photography, which was finished on a digital intermediate that presumably was the digital source for the Blu-ray master. While the source was probably the same as on the U.K. Blu-ray reviewed earlier this year by Dr. Svet Atanasov, the mastering is new, with a substantially higher average bitrate (35.91 vs. 26.08 Mbps). Magnolia's image is superb, with no video noise, solid blacks, exceptional detail, a fine grain structure and a subtly earth-toned color palette that looks nothing like the style of a typical studio film but beautifully captures the ordinariness of Collette's world (under overcast Irish skies) and the inability to distinguish between friends and enemies.

High frequency filtering, artificial sharpening, compression artifacts and any of the other usual suspects that can mar the Blu-ray viewing experience were nowhere to be seen. Whether or not the visual style is to your taste, the Blu-ray replicates it flawlessly.

Shadow Dancer Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

With one exception that cannot be described without spoilers, Shadow Dancer does not have big sound effects for the lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1 track to showcase. It does, however, feature numerous locales with distinctive sonic signatures that are well-represented: the London Underground, the Belfast pub frequented by the McVeighs, a room in an abandoned building where Kevin conducts a harsh interrogation and the sterile, heavily monitored location where Mac recruits Collette, to name a few. The ambient noises of these environments have been layered in with sufficient care that the viewer may not even notice them without deliberately paying attention.

Dialogue is clearly rendered and, at least to my ear, the Irish accents are not too thick to pose any problem for Americans. If any viewer has a problem, subtitles are available. As he did for Marsh's chapter of Red Riding, Dickon Hinchliffe has supplied the tense, anxiety-laden score.

Shadow Dancer Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The U.S. edition of Shadow Dancer has different extras from the U.K. release. Gone is the commentary with director Marsh and actor Clive Owen. Also, this Blu-ray does not include the film's trailer, although it can be found on other Magnolia Blu-rays, e.g., The Brass Teapot. The featurette on the U.K. disc, though differently titled, is probably the same one included here.

• Behind the Scenes of Shadow Dancer (1080i; 1.78:1; 8:28): Despite its brevity, this featurette is informative about the filmmakers' intentions and methods. Some of the on-set and location footage contains significant spoilers for anyone who hasn't yet seen the film.



• Cast and Crew Interviews (1080i; 1.78:1; 27:28): Much of the material for the "behind the scenes" featurette was culled from these interviews. The longer versions and the additional interviewees are worth the additional time.
• Clive Owen
• Andrea Riseborough
• Gillian Anderson
• Bríd Brennan
• Director James Marsh
• Author/Screenwriter Tom Bradby
• Producer Chris Coen



• AXS TV: A Look at Shadow Dancer (1080i; 2.35:1; 3:00): This is essentially a "cutdown" of the "behind the scenes" featurette" listed above.



• Also from Magnolia: As previously noted, the trailer for Shadow Dancer is not included, but trailers are available (in 1080p except where noted) for To the Wonder, No Place on Earth, Hammer of the Gods, Syrup and AXS TV (1080i). These also play at startup, where they can be skipped with the chapter forward button.



• BD-Live: Depending on your internet connection and settings, the disc's BD-Live feature offers access to additional Magnolia trailers.

Shadow Dancer Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

In his interview, producer Chris Coen describes how raising the money for Shadow Dancer was an uphill battle, because as soon as financiers heard the word "IRA", they lost interest. Potential viewers may have the same reaction, but Shadow Dancer is no more about the Troubles than Oliver Hirshbiegel's Five Minutes of Heaven, which was also set in Ireland but dealt with fundamental problems of guilt and forgiveness. Marsh calls it "a family thriller", which is an apt description for a story about a family that has spent twenty years defining its identity by a constant state of vengeance-driven warfare and now faces the prospect of being deprived of its very raison d'être. How will they cope? And what does one make of a man—a good man, or so he seems—trying to turn one member of that family against the others? Such conflicts transcend their immediate occasion. They don't just happen in Belfast. Highly recommended.