Abbey Lee is mainly a fashion model, although she's done some film (memorable as one of the brides in " Mad Max: Fury Road"). Hinds is very creepy, a true madman, and Gugino does her best to fill in the character of Claire with overheated secret torment. "Elizabeth Harvest" instead explains its own plot. "Ex Machina" created a mood where issues of identity, womanhood, personhood, could be explored, all the things present in the original story. There's no room for the metaphoric, the emotional or symbolic. Everybody talks too much." Bluebeard taps into some pretty primal fears, and these elements are presented in a highly literal way. As a character says in Noël Coward 's Hay Fever, "Talk, talk, talk. There is so much explanation necessary to help us understand the basement room that Gutierrez throws in lengthy flashbacks, monologues, plus the discovery of Claire's private diary which details her backstory in a long voiceover sequence. These are eerie choices, giving a sensation of emptiness and dread.īut the pace is glacial. The house is beyond spooky and Gutierrez and his talented cinematographer Cale Finot explore the space with gliding cameras, and almost imperceptible zooms into a vase of flowers, an empty door, the fire in the fireplace. The single-color scenes seem to signify "flashback", but it comes off as slick affectation. The split screens are fun, intensifying the tension as we see Elizabeth hiding from Henry, and Henry in hot pursuit. He uses split screens and single-color palettes, along with gigantic closeups of Elizabeth's startlingly blue eyes, fringed by wet eyelashes. The complicated structure of the script is made more so by Gutierrez's stylistic flourishes, some which work better than others. The characters' secrets pulse into the air, and at times the atmosphere is so over-charged the whole thing tips over into camp melodrama (and not the good kind). Dylan Baker, a cop friend of Henry's, shows up on occasion, driving out to the house, asking questions, but other than that, we're stuck in the belljar with the members of the household. Henry discovers her disobedience and chases her around the house with a huge knife. Elizabeth disobeys, freaking out when she sees a row of cryogenic tanks, filled with her exact replica, submerged in a kind of amniotic fluid. Henry, a Nobel prize winner, warns her not to go into the room in the basement. Danvers" of the household, and Oliver ( Matthew Beard), Henry's visually impaired son, who glides around noiselessly like a cat. She submits to Henry's grunting sexual needs, staring at the ceiling with open flat eyes, and does her best to ingratiate herself with Claire ( Carla Gugino), the mysterious "Mrs. Elizabeth wanders around agog at her new surroundings, at the closet full of clothes fitted just for her. The glass house he has brought her to perches in a mountainous isolated landscape. In the first scene, Elizabeth ( Abbey Lee), a dreamy young woman in a wedding dress, is carried over the threshold by her husband, the much older Henry ( Ciarán Hinds). Writer-director Sebastian Gutierrez is the latest to tackle the rich implications of Bluebeard in his film "Elizabeth Harvest," bringing a modern horror-sci-fi sensibility to the story. The original author, Charles Perrault, father of the fairy tale, often wrote about women and girls in peril ("Little Red Riding Hood," "Cinderella," "Sleeping Beauty," " Bluebeard"). More recently, Alex Garland's extremely effective " Ex Machina" owes much to Bluebeard. Catherine Breillat, born to tackle Bluebeard, made "Barbe Bleue" in 2009, exploring the story's undercurrents of passivity and sexuality. So is " Crimson Peak." There was a witty modern version called "Bluebeard's Eighth Wife," starring Claudette Colbert and Gary Cooper. Alfred Hitchcock's "Rebecca" is a Bluebeard-inspired tale. Pioneer Georges Méliès did a version in 1901 (with some truly spooky effects). From almost the moment cinema was invented, directors have been drawn to the 17th-century fairy tale Bluebeard.
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