Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.5

Thoroughbreds Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Martin Liebman May 29, 2018

Just based off the title, one might be forgiven for imagining Thoroughbreds to be some party-hard movie about a couple of girls who were born-and-bred for boozing or maybe even bumping uglies. But that's not what this is. At all. Writer/Director Cory Finley's film, originally conceived for the stage but ultimately reworked for the screen, tells the story of a pair of disparate and, in their own ways, desperate teenage girls who hatch a plan to pull off a murder. The story is incredibly basic but at its center is a much more complex and demanding, but never convoluted, introspective into the girls' hearts, minds, and souls, exploring the best and worst of who they are and what drives them towards the unspeakable. It's a movie that's not thoroughly or traditionally entertaining but that is thoroughly well crafted and dramatically engaging and certainly one of the year's best little movies.

Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) appears to be a straight-and-narrow girl living in the lap of luxury with her mother (Francie Swift) and her self-obsessed and mean-streaked stepfather Mark (Paul Sparks). Lilly, however, despite her manicured and calm exterior, is a wildly emotional person prone to severe inner restlessness and turmoil. She has been expelled from school for plagiarism and is on her way out to another school tailored to girls with behavioral problems. Lily's one-time best friend, Amanda (Olivia Cooke), is much Lily's opposite: an emotionless vessel who has recently killed her maimed horse with a butcher knife. As the two girls rekindle their relationship -- much more awkward, certainly, than it was in their childhoods -- the perceptive Amanda notes Lily's severe disdain for Mark, which runs deep and is embodied in the gnawing sound of his aerobic rowing exercises that eat away at Lily's soul with every stroke. The two gradually hatch a plan to kill Mark and hire a small-time drug dealer with big aspirations named Tim (Anton Yelchin) to do the deed.

With Thoroughbreds, Cory Finley has crafted a very deliberate, engagingly slow-paced, careful and considered dark character film. Every shot tells its own story and each scene builds its own narrative, both of which funnel into the larger sequences -- chapters, as the movie labels them -- that altogether build an engagingly unique and tonally dark film watching experience. Even as the essential story is incredibly simple, the characters are as complex as they come, without coming across as overburdened by overly engineered depth. The film finds the proper balance between achieving forward story momentum and slow-burn character building and exploration, the latter of which dominates the film, the former of which is largely settled by the end of the first act. It’s methodical, the actors brilliantly capture the unspoken depth as much as the essential physical actions that propel the story, and Finley frames it with exquisite structural draw, keeping it artfully and tellingly simple. He shoots his subjects in a manner that allows the actors to absolutely melt into character, where he simply uses the camera to draw on their innate abilities to shape the characters with very telling, but very natural, cadences that play beautifully to the lens.

The film maintains its tight focus on character, plot, and structure by removing distractions in its first act, introducing and following only the three main characters -- Lily, Amanda, and Mark -- who are, of course, the narrative propellants in the movie. With no artificial distractions or secondary characters interfering, there’s a generous amount of both stated and implied, internal and external, character build in a compact allotment of time. The film opens up in its second act, introducing, primarily, Lily’s seemingly dense, oblivious, and self-focused mother whose only concern is living it up on her new husband’s dime, and Tim, the drug pusher who aspires to one day possess essentially everything Mark has. While act two is a little louder and ventures a bit further beyond Mark’s mansion, the film regains that tight focus in act three, offering several dramatic surprises yet, no matter the direction the story takes, maintaining that same engrossing production and pace status quo that has gripped the viewer from the opening moments and holds on through to the end.

Thoroughbreds Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Thoroughbreds wasn't crafted with visual excess in mind. The film was digitally shot with anamorphic lenses. The resultant image, and Blu-ray transfer, is a bit soft, yields some smudgy edges but there's also a resultant intimacy and character definition that the Blu-ray handles with grace. What the image lacks in film-based cinematic texturing it recoups by way of steady, sturdy textures that are critical in character close-up, both in focus and out of focus areas, that allows for the clarity of actor expressiveness and revelation of inward storytelling emotions that are so necessary to the movie's tone, pace, and narrative. Essential details around the mansion are nicely revealing, lacking that absolute crispness but enjoying enough structural integrity to please. Colors appear a little faded by design, not desaturating the palette but certainly de-emphasizing color as a point of interest. The result is fairly routine warm woods and marble in the mansion, clothes that don't jump, slightly pale skin tones, and dreary, washed-out black levels. Noise is off minimal concern and other source or encode flaws are few and far between. Considering the movie's intended visual structure, it's difficult to be too critical of this image, even if it's not the sharpest, cleanest, more bountifully colorful on the market.

Thoroughbreds Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Thoroughbreds features a bread-and-butter DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 lossless soundtrack. The film's sonic needs are not immense, but they need be precise. A burst of tribal drums every few moments punctuates the open, playing to good spacing and low end effect. Other than that, sound never rises to any level of intensity until the 35-minute mark when Mark's aerobic rowing exercises, which grate on Lily's nerves, are heightened to punctuate a moment when Lily, and the story, take a major turn. The film features various one-off effects, such as a piercing tone midway through as Lily imagines Amanda's killing of her horse. Such little deviances are welcome and play well, and the film uses its sound effectively and sporadically to enhance a plot point or build a narrative advancement. There are few ambient effects of note, perhaps the most sonically populous coming partway through when the audience is introduced to Tim. Dialogue propels the film forward, and it presents in perfect working order, even in what is sometimes near whispered volume.

Thoroughbreds Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Thoroughbreds' Blu-ray release contains deleted scenes and two featurettes. A Movies Anywhere digital copy code is included with purchase.

• Deleted Scenes (1080p): Two scenes: You Don't Know Her Name? (1:28) and Condolences (0:25).
• The Look of Thoroughbreds (1080p, 3:39): A quick look at the story's origins for the stage and transition to screen, the mansion which is described as a character in the film, noir tropes and imagery, character qualities, David Lynch inspirations, shooting digital and anamorphic, and Cory Finley's direction.
• Character Profiles (1080p): Bite-sized extras that survey the film's four main characters. Includes Lily (1:31), Amanda (1:48), Tim (1:21), and Mark (1:28).

Thoroughbreds Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Thoroughbreds is one of the best little films of the year. It's a welcome departure from large-budget extravagance, a movie that builds its cinema capital on intimate characterization and subtle ebbs and flows that ultimately lead to a powerful wave of character intensity. It's sharply written, very well acted, smartly photographed, and crisply edited, yielding a wonderful, must-see picture. Universal's Blu-ray offers good video and audio alongside a couple of deleted scenes and two featurettes. Recommended.