Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		4.0

The Barber Blu-ray Movie Review

Forget Sweeney Todd

Reviewed by Michael Reuben April 28, 2015

The Barber is the debut feature from director Basel Owies, and it's an unexpected thriller anchored by a strong lead performance from Scott Glenn, who usually plays supporting parts. A reliable presence, Glenn has portrayed everything from a thuggish rodeo rider in Urban Cowboy to Clarice Starling's mentor in The Silence of the Lambs to the polarizing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in W. His ability to play heroes and villains with equal conviction is essential for the title character in Owies' film, who may or may not be a serial killer.

The Barber is the first feature from Chapman Filmed Entertainment, a company formed by the Dodge College of Film & Media Arts at California's Chapman University. Both director Owies and the film's producer, Travis Knox, are Dodge graduates. The company's aim is to pair students with film industry professionals on high-quality projects with low budgets. Judging from this initial entry, the formula has promise. With no money to waste, most of the effort goes into the writing and the performances—and it shows.

An efficient opening montage establishes the back story: A serial killer in the Chicago era is targeting young women. His victims are buried alive. A police detective, Thomas McCormack (Thomas Calabro), arrests a local man, Francis Allen Visser (Glenn), but Visser is released for lack of evidence. A despondent McCormack commits suicide, leaving his young son, John, an orphan.

Twenty years later, Visser has changed his name to Eugene Van Wingerdt and relocated to the small Wisconsin town of Moraine. Now an elderly man with a limp, Eugene runs the local barber shop, won't tolerate bad language from his sole employee, Luis (Max Arciniega), attends church regularly and is close friends with the town's top lawman, Chief Hardaway (Stephen Tobolowsky, cast against type). One day, an adult John McCormack (Chris Coy, Deliver Us From Evil) arrives in town, having tracked down Eugene after a long and arduous search. John has an agenda, but is it revenge or something else? And Eugene is clearly a complicated man, as would be anyone who has had to disappear and reinvent himself in a new identity. But is Eugene a victim who was wrongly accused and forced into hiding because the world now believed him to be a monster, or is he the monster that John's father believed him to be, who has been hibernating all these years? The Barber is about these two men sparring, dodging and feinting, as each tries to discover who the other one really is. Even if you think you know who is what, Coy and Glenn make their battle interesting to watch.

Other characters weave in and out of the conflict. A mysterious woman from John's past, Audrey (Kristen Hager, Being Human ), comes looking for him but meets Eugene first. At the local diner where Eugene eats regularly, John picks up a waitress named Kelli (Olivia Taylor Dudley), who finds herself an unwitting pawn in the larger game being played. Luis thinks that he's stumbled onto relevant information and tries to use it to his advantage, but he has no idea who or what he's dealing with. Chief Hardaway (whose name is an obvious joke) takes the small-town sheriff's stereotypical dim view of outsiders, but he is stunned when his friend Eugene asks him to treat John with leniency. The chief interprets the request as an example of the old man's Christian charity (and maybe it is).

No more can be said about The Barber without spoilers, except to assure the reader that screenwriter Max Enscoe has provided a satisfying resolution.

The Barber Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Specific information about the shooting format of The Barber was not available, but it was obviously shot digitally, which is consistent with the micro-budget approach of Chapman Filmed Entertainment. The cinematographer was Allen Liu, making his feature film debut as director of photography after years of experience on the crews of numerous films, both studio and independent, and serving as DP of several shorts. According to the credits, post-production was completed on a digital intermediate, from which ARC Entertainment's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray was presumably sourced.

The Blu-ray image is clean, sharp and detailed, with a naturalistic palette that emphasizes the warm earth tones of the country setting, as compared to the cool blues and blacks of Chicago. Blacks are solid, contrast is good and the whole affair has the grainless HDTV appearance that many Blu-ray enthusiasts have come to prefer as the visual style of choice. With limited extras, ARC has provided an average bitrate of 24.96 Mbps, which is very good for digitally originated material.

The Barber Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Barber's 5.1 soundtrack, encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA, is effective but not especially showy. Sequences like the early Chicago flashback, which includes a brief insert of one of the serial killer's victims pounding against her coffin, register forcefully, and there are a few encounters in the present day that involve loud sounds with intense impact (e.g., when Chief Hardaway arrests and interrogates John). Generally, though, The Barber's sound mix focuses on dialogue, which remains in front, and environmental sounds appropriate to a small town, including the occasional downpour. A few brief scenes in present-day Chicago aren't set in any locations that would vary the soundscape.

The dialogue is always clear, and the musical score by Freddy Sheinfeld (TV's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) adds an understated thriller element without going overboard.

The Barber Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Alternate Ending (1080p; 2.39:1; 3:19): This ending is very close to the existing film, but it shifts the emotional emphasis in a manner that leaves a question mark hanging over the conclusion.



• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 2.39:1): Although no explanation is given, I suspect these scenes were cut either for pacing or because they might have clarified uncertainties in the story too early.
• Carving (1:42)
• Gun in the Mouth (2:22)
• Not My First Rodeo (2:18)
• The Watch (3:11)



• Extended Scenes (1080p; 2.39:1): These longer versions of two scenes could easily have remained in the film, but neither is necessary.
• Audrey on the Job (1:39)
• Made Me Run (1:31)



• Trailer (1080p; 2.39:1; 2:20): The trailer effectively conveys the essentials of the plot without giving away too much.



• Additional Trailers: At startup, the disc plays trailers for Something Wicked, Zarra's Law and RPG: Real Playing Game, which can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are not otherwise available once the disc loads.

The Barber Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Scott Glenn's performance in The Barber is a masterpiece of ambiguity, constantly hovering between a man wrongly accused and a monster hiding in plain sight. The film doesn't break new ground or re-invent a genre, but Glenn holds the screen, and you end up studying his expressions for clues just as intensely as the people who suspect him. The film is carefully plotted and capably told, and it's been given a superior presentation on Blu-ray. Recommended.