The Act: The Complete Limited Series Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		4.0

The Act: The Complete Limited Series Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Justin Dekker July 18, 2024

Originally premiering on Hulu in March of 2019, the miniseries 'The Act' detailing the headline-grabbing story of Gypsy-Rose Blanchard and her mother Dee Dee makes its Blu-ray debut courtesy of Universal. Based on true events, Joey King stars as Gypsy-Rose, the infamous Munchausen's by proxy victim imprisoned for the murder of her mother (portrayed by Patrica Arquette). All eight hour-long episodes are housed on two discs, four episodes per disc. No supplementary material is included, nor is a slipcover or a Digital Code.

When the story of Gypsy-Rose Blanchard originally broke several years ago, I somehow managed to miss most of the details and garnered only a high-level understanding of the situation: a medically abused young woman was involved in the murder of her mother in order to escape the lifetime of mistreatment she had suffered. While Hulu's The Act makes routine use of the disclaimer "While this program is based on real events, some scenes and characters have been dramatized or fictionalized" at the end of each episode, after some reading, the miniseries seems to be much more accurate than not.

The miniseries is told in a series of flashbacks, with each episode providing story elements moving forward from the time of the murder of Dee Dee Blanchard and going back to provide details of key events leading up to the night of June 10, 2015. Over the span of eight episodes, Patricia Arquette, brandishing a sickeningly sweet southern accent and King emulating Gypsy's squeaky and high-pitched voice take the viewer through Gypsy's birth, her early childhood, and a fictionalized event that led to her mother putting her in a wheelchair at a young age. It also takes considerable time to show King's Gyspy fighting to participate in typical teenage activities like talking about boys, using social media, texting, and wanting to spend time with her neighborhood friend. Through every encounter and interaction, both women take care to maintain the illusion of Gypsy's serious and fragile medical state. Her mother meticulously orchestrates illnesses and resultant restrictions, and King's Gypsy typically plays along, even if begrudgingly.

Joey King's (The Princess, The Kissing Booth (1, 2, and 3)) physical transformation into her character of Gypsy-Rose is remarkable. With her head shaved, and wearing a similar hat and glasses the resemblance is uncanny, so too are her voice and mannerisms. In the first half of the miniseries, it is easy to see Gypsy-Rose as a simple victim. Her mother Dee Dee (Patrica Arquette, True Romance, Boyhood, Boardwalk Empire) is firmly in control, taking her to doctor's appointments and dictating treatments, deciding what Gypsy will wear, determining which friends she can see and when, and even going so far as to bathe her. When Gypsy pushes back in any way, she is met with her mother's anger, emotional manipulation, and is given medication to make her more docile among other punishments. But neither reality nor the full story told here are quite that simple.

If King's Gypsy garners a significant reserve of sympathy in the first half of the series, she begins losing it piece by piece in the second. This portion of the story sees a now (at least) 18-year-old Gypsy start to exert more control over her own life. She pushes back against her mother's wishes and through a surreptitiously obtained laptop starts a secret online relationship with Nick Godejohn. While Godejohn, as portrayed here, is simple-minded and well-meaning, he is also deeply troubled. The viewer, due to the trauma she has experienced and continues to endure, is happy to see her connecting with another person in the outside world. When she is interacting with Nick, the infantilized woman-girl with, as her mother professes, the mind of a child, vanishes. The high-pitched voice remains, but in her place is clearly an adult, with grown-up thoughts, desires, a vision for the future, and a clear agenda on how to bring it about. Gypsy the child, under her mother's thumb and subjected to a series of horrors has the moral high ground. But for Gypsy the adult, as the murder of her mother is determined to be the only solution and the plan begins to take shape, the moral and ethical justification for her (and Nick's) actions become much murkier.

Rather than taking a clear position on the case, the miniseries is content to simply relay dramatized facts and depictions of events without much bias. As their relationship grows, Gypsy and Nick display their ability to bring a plan to fruition, albeit a strange one, of having Nick travel for hours to a theater in order to manufacture a chance for him to meet her and her mother. While the scheme doesn't go exactly to plan, it does serve as a dry run of sorts for what is to come. It's this level of scheming that also clouds the justification for the necessity of the murder. As her former neighbor Mel (Chloë Sevigny, Big Love, The Dead Don't Die) asks her before her trial, why didn't she just leave? Certainly in her younger years that would likely have been a virtual impossibility. But as a legal adult, instead of engineering a murder at 3 AM while her mother slept, it's clear the pair could simply have fled to his home in Wisconsin or any other place they desired to go. Murder, perhaps, didn't have to be the solution, but it's the solution she chose. Was she justified in taking the actions she took? And who is Gypsy-Rose, really? The answer to those and a host of other questions are largely up to the viewer to decide. But by the time the credits roll, the creators Nick Antosca and Michelle Dean seem ready to subtly voice their opinion, with The Velvet Underground and Nico's "Femme Fatale" playing as some summary statements about Gypsy-Rose and Nick appear on the screen.

The contents of the two discs are as follows:

Disc One

• La Maison du Bon Reve - Dee Dee and Gypsy-Rose Blanchard move into a home in a new city looking for a fresh start. Gypsy, evidently, suffers from a great many medical ailments and her mother seems dedicated to her around the clock care. But as the neighbors discover, things aren't quite what they appear.

• Teeth - Gypsy's late-night sugar binges result in the need for some drastic dental work. On a happier note, Gypsy wins the "Child of the Year Award". But the situation between Dee Dee and Gypsy-Rose starts to unravel as a new doctor begins to question their story.

• Two Wolverines - After attending a cosplay convention, Gypsy-Rose is swept off her feet by a man dressed as Wolverine. The budding relationship prompts her to start finding ways to connect with those in the outside world and Gypsy-Rose begins to doubt some of the things her mother tells her.

• Stay Inside - Dee Dee looks for ways to maintain control over Gypsy-Rose as she turns 18. Gypsy's secret online relationship takes a dark turn while Dee Dee starts to suffer from a health issue of her own.

Disc Two

• Plan B - After an outing doesn't go as planned and Dee Dee attempts to regain control over her daughter, and Gypsy- Rose gets the text from Nick that she's been waiting for.

• A Whole New World - As Gypsy-Rose and Nick start out on their life together, Gypsy is soon disillusioned that things aren't quite as rosy as she thought they'd be. We also get glimpses of Gypsy's childhood from relative "normalcy" to the beginnings of the abuse she was to suffer.

• Bonnie and Clyde - Living with Nick and his parents in Big Bend, Wisconsin is not what Gypsy-Rose had hoped for and she longs to return to to her little pink house, so the pair take to the internet to make sure Dee Dee's body is discovered.

• Free - Gypsy-Rose and Nick deal with prison life and their impending trials. Upon learning the truth about Gypsy-Rose and Dee-Dee, their friends and neighbors feel betrayed, and Gypsy-Rose reunites with her father.

The Act: The Complete Limited Series Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

As one is growing to expect from Universal, The Act has been given a rock-solid 1080p transfer. Viewers will quickly and consistently be excited by the level of detail present in virtually every shot. Environmental particulars in the Blanchard house are all open for inspection, both early in the film when the home's tidy rooms reflect Dee Dee's absolute power and control over her daughter's life, and later in the film as well when the cluttered and haphazard piles and over stuffed bins that litter every room and hallway offer more to explore and reflect Dee Dee's failing health and loss of control over Gypsy. Fabrics such as fuzzy slippers and bathrobes, satiny princess gowns, and cheap wigs are all wonderfully tactile and realistic. Black levels are typically very pleasing and only rarely obscure detail. Skin tones universally look true and natural, no matter the state of health of the characters in- shot. Pinks, greens, reds, blues and yellows frequently burst from the screen due to the furnishings of the home and the wigs and costumes that Gypsy and sometimes those around her wear. I did not detect any defects or anomalies.

The Act: The Complete Limited Series Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Act come equipped with an English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that is more than up to the task of handling the on-screen action. As much of the film focuses on Gypsy and Dee Dee, two women who live a very isolated existence, nothing here will tax a more robust audio set up. Primarily concerned with dialogue, it is rendered cleanly and intelligibly and typically placed front and center. Directionality, when those isolated moments arise, is handled accurately, and objects and people move smoothly and precisely through the sound field. Surrounds are employed in a more subtle way, providing light atmospherics to busy environments like conventions and shopping malls. They are, however, most impactful and noticeable during the infrequent moments when carefully selected musical tracks like "Bonnie And Clyde" (Serge Gainsbourg & Brigitte Bardot) and "Femme Fatale" (The Velvet Underground and Nico) are allowed to dominate and giving the track its most powerful moments. Bass is more than adequate for for the domestic world our main characters inhabit and provide realistic depth to the mundane sound effects found in the episodes and provide a nice bottom end to the music as well. English SDH subtitles are also available.

The Act: The Complete Limited Series Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

There are no on-disc supplemental features on either disc of The Act.

The Act: The Complete Limited Series Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Hulu's The Act is a difficult miniseries to sit through as the viewer knows the psychological, emotional, and physical abuse being depicted on- screen actually occurred. The murder of Dee Dee Blanchard and the subsequent trial captivated many, and the fact that Gypsy-Rose attracted millions of followers on social media after her release from prison December 28, 2023 suggests that it still does. The miniseries, to it's credit, does not expressly convey an opinion of Gypsy-Rose and Nick's actions, electing to relay events as factually as possible, even to the point of virtually duplicating the video Gypsy shot of her and Nick in their hotel room after they fled the scene of the crime, word for word and frame for frame. Patricia Arquette turns in a wonderful performance as Dee Dee, but the real showstopper here is Joey King's amazing transformation into Gypsy-Rose Blanchard. It's a brilliantly complex, emotional, and powerful portrayal. The lack of supplemental features is disappointing, though the technical merits of the discs are strong. For those who gravitate to tales of true crime, or those who were entranced by the story as it originally played out, The Act comes strongly recommended.