Tiger House Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		2.0

Tiger House Blu-ray Movie Review

The Tiger Sleeps Tonight

Reviewed by Michael Reuben November 3, 2015

Tiger House is a home invasion thriller in which almost all the action occurs in one location. Such stories are ideal for limited budgets, and the limitations often inspire creative solutions by writers and directors seeking to squeeze the most out of scant resources. But that didn't happen with Tiger House. The script by British crime novelist Simon Lewis provides the essentials of a plot, but its characters never become more than plot functions; they don't engage the viewer sufficiently to make the experience worthwhile. First-time feature director Thomas Daley shoots scenes competently, but even the flashiest visuals can't draw an audience into a film without characters who are interesting enough to be worthy of attention. At 83 minutes, Tiger House runs about half the length of Ridley Scott's The Martian (to pick a random example currently playing in theaters), but it feels twice as long. That's the difference between a film that engages your emotions and one that leaves you detached and checking your watch.

A British/South African co-production, Tiger House was filmed entirely in Cape Town, with post-production completed in the U.K. It has bypassed theatrical release and is being issued direct-to-video and via streaming services. The U.S. distributor is Magnolia Pictures, which usually assembles an informative press kit to accompany its releases but has not created one for Tiger House. Make of that omission what you will.

Although the film's location isn't formally identified, the accents indicate that it is set in England. A prologue introduces us to a teenage couple, Kelly (Kaya Scodelario, who resembles a young Nicole Kidman) and Mark (Daniel Boyd). Kelly talks about her rigorous training schedule for gymnastics. Mark shows her the crossbow he brought back from France, which leads to a mishap. The viewer can reasonably assume that the crossbow will reappear at an appropriate time later in the film.

The prologue also features a visual quirk: It's a cellphone video displayed in the center of the widescreen frame. Since Tiger House is not a "found footage" movie, there is no obvious reason to display the prologue this way, except perhaps to distinguish it from everything else in the film and, possibly, to suggest a security camera's point of view. Security cameras are a recurring motif throughout Tiger House, with their impersonal images often spread across the screen in multiples of six, since the home where Mark resides has hidden surveillance everywhere.

Because Mark's mother, Lynn (Julie Summers), is a snob who does not approve of Kelly—she "stacks shelves in a supermarket", Lynn says derisively—the couple carries on in secret, with Kelly using her gymnastic skills to scale the wall to Mark's bedroom window after dark. That is how she happens to be in the house when four armed and masked men methodically break in and take Mark and his mother hostage to force his stepfather, Doug (Andrew Brent), to help them rob the bank where he works.

The bulk of Tiger House consists of Kelly's increasingly frantic efforts to hide from—and then, after she is discovered, to evade—the home invaders. The one thing that Kelly does not do, even though she appears to have several opportunities, is leave the house and run for help, because that would take her outside the movie's artificially restricted setting. While it's entirely possible for a panicked individual in real life to make such a mistake, the heroine of a thriller cannot do so without losing the audience's sympathy, which she has to retain for the film to work. Even if we remain confident that Kelly will eventually save herself (and maybe also Mark and his family), we're less invested in the outcome if she stumbles into it by accident after making one wrong move after another.

The screenplay is no help on this point. Thrillers should be efficient, but there's a difference between efficiency and incompleteness. Tiger House doesn't take the time to establish Kelly as a character or her relationship with Mark as something worth fighting for. (There's an awkward attempt to do so via a kind of feminist shortcut, but it's trite and ineffective.) Had the script spent just a few more minutes showing a young couple in the flush of first love, hoping and dreaming about the future, Kelly's plight might have been more unnerving and compelling.

The thieves turn out to be their own worst enemies. In the course of their initial break-in, the leader, Shane (Dougray Scott), is badly injured, leaving him unable to control the young hothead, Callum (Ed Skrein), who is only part of the crew because Shane feels he owes something out of loyalty to Callum's dead father. The other two, Reg (Brandon Auret) and Sveta (Langley Kirkwood), didn't want anything to do with Callum in the first place, because he's more interested in violence than a smooth operation. Sure enough, it's Callum who is responsible for a body count, and it's Callum who becomes obsessed with tracking down Kelly, when he should be focusing on implementing Shane's carefully planned scheme to escape with millions of dollars in stolen money.

The ending of Tiger House probably sounded fine on paper, but it can't work unless the film has effectively pulled its audience into an alternate world of pulp logic in which rough justice allows people to get away with acts that, in the real world, would almost certainly land them in jail. Directors like Quentin Tarantino or the late Tony Scott excel at creating such stylized, alternative worlds that operate according to their own logic, but Daley, who comes from the theater, hasn't yet mastered that trick, at least on film. Maybe next time.

Tiger House Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Specific information about the shooting format was not available, but judging both from the image itself and the glimpses of equipment in the behind-the-scenes featurette, Tiger House was shot digitally. The cinematographer was South African DP Willie Nel. Portions of the film, such as the prologue and the frequent inserts of black-and-white security camera shots, are deliberately low-resolution, but the remainder is sharp and detailed, making due allowance for Nel's frequent use of shadow and darkness. Much of Tiger House takes place either at night or in Kelly's various hiding places, where she is usually crouching or cowering out of sight, with only part of her visible to the camera. (Other characters are treated the same way.) Nel also sometimes experiments with deliberate defocusing and other tricks in an effort to vary the visual texture within the closed space of a single house. The Blu-ray reproduces all of these variations with solid blacks, appropriate contrast and a varied palette that ranges from the bright red of the uniform that Kelly finds in the attic (and from which she borrows the jacket) to the cool blue of the backyard swimming pool, where she confronts one of the robbers. Mark's room is filled with posters, drawings and bric-a-brac. It's the most colorful room in the house.

Tiger House has a number of scenes of complex action, but it also has many moments where the camera simply holds on Kelly's face as she tries to avoid detection. With careful allocation of the bit budget, the average bitrate of 21.97 Mbps seems OK for digitally acquired material. Certainly nothing in the image suggested either filtering or artifacts.

Tiger House Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Tiger House's 5.1 soundtrack, encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA, has several big moments that can't be described without spoilers, but suffice it to say that the track is up to the task of conveying them forcefully. Gunfire, body blows and power tools are among the sounds that make an impression. The dialogue is mixed a little on the low side, which can be tricky if one's ear is not accustomed to English or Scots accents. Use the subtitles as necessary. The Irish folk-inflected score is by Roger Goula Sarda (A Brilliant Young Mind).

Tiger House Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• The Making of Tiger House (1080p; 1.78:1; 19:33): Somewhat longer than the typical EPK, this look at the making of the film includes interviews with writer Lewis, director Daley, cinematographer Nel and most of the cast.



• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 2.35:1; 1:41): "They planned for everything. Except her."



• Also from Magnolia Home Entertainment: The disc includes trailers for Last Shift, The Blood Lands, Skin Trade and The Dead Lands, as well as promos for the Chideo web service and AXS TV. These also play at startup, where they can be skipped with the chapter forward button.



• BD-Live: As of this writing, attempting to access BD-Live gave the message "Check back for updates".

Tiger House Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

It's hard to say what Tiger House needed to make it work. Perhaps a different cast (Daniel Boyd's Mark is particularly weak), perhaps a revised script—or maybe the premise just doesn't have enough substance to sustain an 80-minute thriller. Whatever the reason, I can't recommend the film, despite the Blu-ray's technical merits.