She Will Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.0

She Will Blu-ray Movie Review

Unfinished business.

Reviewed by Randy Miller III December 9, 2022

Vengeance arrives much later than expected in Charlotte Colbert's feature-length debut She Will, a psychological horror film with a creamy #MeToo filling. Our story follows bitter former actress Veronica Ghent (Alice Krige) during a trip back to her native Scotland; she's on the mend from a recent double mastectomy, flanked by her reluctant young nurse Desi (Kota Eberhardt), and just looking for a quiet week of solitude. A booking snafu turns "solitude" into "manor filled with annoying guests", so Veronica and Desi hastily retreat to a private cabin on the grounds, generally avoiding most of the group activities led by an artist named Tirador (Rupert Everett). Veronica is a troubled soul and has nightmarish visions related to an event during her teenage years, possibly at the hands of aging film star Hathbourne (Malcolm McDowell) who's in town on business. One more li'l thing: the manor is situated in an area where witches were once burned at the stake, with ashes still floating in the air and mud which often seeps into their cabin floor from below.

Supernatural events happen early and often, with the majority of She Will following Veronica's ever-loosening grip on reality, where waking dreams blur the line between conscious actions and unexplained happenings. It's not long before Desi suffers from the same symptoms, too, due in part to both an eventual bond with Veronica as well as a nighttime attack at the hands of a local man. Soon enough, they even find themselves present in each other's visions, and even apparently develop the ability to manifest physical results with no apparent hindsight after waking.

Still, symbolism carries most of the weight here... and it pretty much has too, because She Will is a atmosphere-first experience with much less narrative meat than is needed to carry a feature-length film to fruition. (Given the director's background in both visual arts and short films, neither observation is much of a surprise.) It does have its fair share of highlights -- including the initial premise, most of its key performances, and its editing and production design -- and is certainly impressive in its overall confident construction, but the formula ultimately grows repetitive with at least 30 minutes to go, which gives the bulk of She Will's second half much less impact than is needed. The main supernatural element -- the surrounding area's historical connection to witches -- feels a bit undercooked and is driven by flashes of visual imagery that don't all fully register, which somewhat cheapens its psychological effectiveness. It's also one of those films where pretty much every male character is either a creep or an outright rapist, so there's that too.

Three reasonably big names elevate the film's cast and crew list to surprising heights: actor Malcolm McDowell, of course, as well as composer Clint Mansell and none other than Dario Argento as an executive producer. This doesn't necessarily smell of "stunt casting" because the first two put in impressive work without being overshadowed, and if nothing else should be considered a vote of confidence for the first-time director, who also co-wrote the film with Kitty Percy. While there's room for improvement, at the very least She Will is told from an interesting perspective, has a few visual tricks up its sleeve, and can possibly be read at a deeper level... so take that star rating up there with a grain of salt and decide for yourself. Sadly, IFC Films' Blu-ray doesn't encourage a blind buy with a decent A/V presentation but absolutely no bonus features, which may have smoothed over some of my nitpicks about the story.

She Will Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The all-digital She Will is largely impressive from a visual standpoint, with clean compositions and clever camerawork being just a few of the highlights. It's a mostly dark and underlit affair that, whether intentional or just a byproduct of its design, flattens out considerably in its darkest moments, where shadows and the like rarely achieve true "letterbox black". These somewhat mushy moments are nonetheless handled well enough on IFC Films' single-layered Blu-ray (a movie-only disc), showing no real signs of artifacting or crush; if anything, the only mild drawbacks are stray moments of banding on harsher gradients and a few fade-outs. The color grading pushes warm and cold tones to create a slight illusion of depth, with accurate skin tones that are unsurprisingly influenced by ambient lighting. Overall, its a very good effort for a film of this type, which isn't surprising given the director's background in visual arts.

She Will Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Although I mostly enjoyed the film's often aggressive approach to ambient sound as well as the original score by Clint Mansell (former lead singer of the band Pop Will Eat Itself, as well as the composer for Requiem for a Dream and other films), a few stray issues keep the Blu-ray's otherwise impressive DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio mix from scoring higher. I'm not sure if its occasional volume level variances are intentional or they were just an oversight during the mixing process, but there are times when dialogue and other effects are noticeably smothered by the music and background effects; not in a way that seemed stylistic, but just oddlyimbalanced. While these moments clearly don't dominate She Will, as a whole it's also louder than average; I had to bring down my receiver volume a solid ~8dB from standard listening levels to find a comfortable middle ground. This is still a pretty decent effort and definitely striking at times, but more careful treatment of She Will's source material would have yielded more satisfying results.

She Will Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

This one-disc release ships in a keepcase with eye-catching cover artwork. Sadly, no extras have been included; given the film's subject matter and extremely vague atmosphere, some clarity from the director would've helped.

She Will Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Charlotte Colbert's She Will is well-acted and intensely atmospheric with an intriguing setup, but there's not enough substance here to fill a feature-length film. There's very little direction to the narrative and, while Colbert's background in visual arts and short films gives it limited strength, the end result is an uneven and somewhat unfinished experience. IFC Films' Blu-ray unfortunately doesn't fill in all the blanks: it A/V presentation is decent (despite a few reservations about the audio mix), but a complete lack of extras really hurts this one. Try before you buy, surely.