Unintended Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

Unintended Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 28, 2020

Unintended hinges upon the repressed memory of a horrifying incident in a young girl’s life, and that is both the film’s strongest asset as well as its most significant liability. Lea (played by Hannah Westerfield as a teen and Elizabeth Lail as a young woman) is already traumatized as a child due to the fact that her family is about to move from the sylvan enclave of their longtime upstate New York environment to Houston. The young Lea spends her last day where she grew up roaming around the woods and playing with both friends and by herself at an isolated treehouse where she keeps a stash of her personal playthings. When she returns to fetch them the afternoon of her departure, a silly prank by a teen boy named Bill (Jay Jay Warren) leads to apparent tragedy when, after a scuffle with Lea which also involves a handgun, he falls into an abandoned mineshaft. Lea attempts unsuccessfully to rescue him, but upon returning to her parents and confessing in a panicked account, she’s dismissed by them as suffering from an overactive imagination, and the family takes off for their new location.

The film then segues forward to find Lea as a young woman strung out on anti anxiety medications, having completely suppressed the memory of what happened to her. Flashes of the incident still haunt her (as is often the cliché ridden case in films dealing with past traumas), and she ultimately decides to return to New York to try to reconstruct her memory. Now all of that is solid enough, if kind of preposterous on its face, but then the whole bulk of Unintended tries to whip up suspense as to whether or not Lea may have had a hand in actually killing Bill in their long ago fracas. That particular plot element would seem to be absolutely ridiculous on any number of levels, since one might assume that if a teen boy in a rather small community suddenly went missing, some news of it might have seeped out somewhere along the way.

Unintended Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Unintended is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of FilmRise and MVD Visual with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. Captured with Alexa and presumably finished at a 2K DI, this is a rather nice looking presentation that takes full advantage of some really lovely scenery in upstate New York. Wide vistas of forests, rivers and waterfalls all look great, with a natural appearing palette and generally very good detail levels. Some later material in the series of mines and/or caves that Lea explores can be a bit murky, and there are few signs of banding that are most noticeable during fades.

Unintended Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Unintended features DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and 2.0 tracks. The surround track nicely opens up the glut of ambient environmental effects that are utilized in the outdoor scenes, which are the vast majority of the film. The film's score by Spencer David Hutchings exploits flute and piano and is quite evocative, sounding nicely lyrical and full bodied throughout this problem free track.

Unintended Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Photo Gallery (1080p) is authored without a timecode but does advance automatically, so have the Pause button on your remote handy if you want to linger on any given image.


• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 1:09)

Unintended Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I kept wondering if Unintended was going to tip over into horror film territory as the grown and addled Lea returned to the "scene of the crime" to find out what may have happened, but instead this film wants to be a more character driven piece about trauma and reconciliation. I think it might have worked better in that regard if the general setup weren't so blatantly odd. Still, performances are involving, and the cinematography and score are both very good, with technical merits on the Blu-ray disc generally solid, for those considering a purchase.