5.4 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 2.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
In the 1970s, a psychology professor at Oxford and a small group students assemble at a secluded estate to research and treat Jane Harper, a troubled woman who spent her youth moving from foster family to foster family and is thought to be the cause of strange phenomena.
Starring: Jared Harris, Sam Claflin, Erin Richards, Rory Fleck Byrne, Olivia CookeHorror | 100% |
Mystery | 14% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1
English, English SDH, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
UV digital copy
Slipcover in original pressing
Region A (locked)
Movie | 2.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
The illustrious imprint of Hammer Films has been struggling to rise from the dead like a slightly arthritic Christopher Lee stumbling around one of those old sixties’ Dracula outings that defined the studio for a generation of horror fans. Hammer’s track record since its revival has been spotty at best, with high profile efforts like Let Me In withering, but equally high profile efforts like The Woman in Black doing more than respectable business. The Quiet Ones may not be the best example of a tie-breaker, for in many ways it’s not really in the traditional mold of a Hammer enterprise to begin with. Emphasizing psychological angst over on-screen gore (something it shares with The Woman in Black), The Quiet Ones bears that always questionable imprimatur of supposedly having been based on actual events, which some cynics may decide is nothing more than the film’s passing allusions to so-called “Skinner Boxes”. There actually is some little known research project where a bunch of experimenters attempted to “harvest” their emotional energy that serves as the “fact” based element of The Quiet Ones, but the real fact here is that ultimately it doesn’t matter if The Quiet Ones is ripped from today’s (or yesterday’s) headlines or merely the artifice of an overheated screenwriter’s imagination, for it’s a curiously uninspired horror tale that never lives up to its potential. The ancient dialectic between science and religion provides the subtext for this tale of a young woman who is either seriously mentally ill or possessed. A crusading 1970s Oxford professor named Joseph Coupland (Jared Harris) has assumed control (in every sense of the word) of an abandoned girl named Jane Harper (Olivia Cooke), keeping her imprisoned in a tiny room where he subjects her to nonstop sensory assault courtesy of flashing lights and loud music (even worse—loud seventies music). Coupland is absolutely convinced whatever is afflicting Jane can be quantified and physically extracted from the girl, thereby making her Patient Zero in Coupland’s efforts to “cure Mankind” of all such mental and/or emotional disabilities. If The Quiet Ones had had the courage to stick to this thesis, it might have provided at least a modicum of chills and thrills as Jane’s devolving state makes the experiments surrounding her more and more treacherous. Instead, The Quiet Ones opts for more pedestrian scares like booming sounds emanating from the subwoofers to instill a modicum of adrenaline rushes in the audience. When the film finally surrenders to a completely rote “explanation” for the seemingly supernatural phenomena attending Jane’s predicament, the Satanic handwriting is already firmly scrawled on the Skinner Box wall.
The Quiet Ones is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate FIlms with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer (mostly) in 1.78:1 (some of the "found footage" has been altered to look like traditional 70s' era Kodachrome stock at around 1.33:1 with rounded edges, as shown in screenshot 9). The Quiet Ones was in fact shot digitally with the Arri Alexa, but then in typical moviemaking logic, much of that footage was tweaked in post to actually resemble old school film. Go figure. The ironic thing is that it's the found footage and especially "archival" elements (see screenshot 5) that really tend to impress here, at times more so than the "contemporary" footage that is part of the traditional narrative flow. The palette here is intentionally subdued, exploiting a lot browns, beiges and grays, a choice that is further exacerbated by the film's tendency to be pretty dark and ill defined quite a bit of the time. There are one or two notable exceptions, including a fairly bright sequence late in the film out in the experiment house's garden (see screenshot 17) where colors pop at least somewhat more vividly. This boasts a reasonably sharp looking image within the confines of the film's intentionally tamped down style.
You probably won't ever accuse The Quiet One's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix of being subtle, but it's certainly aggressive and probably overall the most memorable aspect of the film. The hokey use of thudding low frequency effects may be hackneyed, but I defy you not to jolt when they occur (repreatedly) throughout the film. There's good attention paid to directionality, even with regard to these effects, and dialogue is always rendered cleanly and clearly. Fidelity is top notch and dynamic range is extremely wide.
The Quiet Ones is passably effective at a couple of key junctures, but it tends to undercut its effectiveness with an overly literal visual treatment (including some pretty lame CGI). This story requires a much more ambivalent perspective to really hit home, and instead The Quiet Ones lays everything out in a neat little row, with no room for interpretation. Technical merits (especially the audio) are quite strong for those considering a purchase.
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