Blu-ray Movie Reviews

A man wakes up deep inside a cave. Suffering amnesia, he has no recollection of how he came to be here or of what happened to the man whose body he finds beside him. Tailed by a mysterious creature, he must continue through this strange and fantastic world.

I heard a bit about this film while it was enjoying a very limited release here stateside in smaller theaters. Sci-fi films are sparse these days so I always try and find what I can so I was anxious to see this one as I had heard fairly good things. Unfortunately, this wasn’t my cup of tea. The film is very bleak, has little to no character development, and the story is confusing and lacks any emotional impact. You find yourself watching this one and feeling completely indifferent about anything going on, if you can even get through it. I felt like I was watching the cut scenes from the beginning of a video game rather than a feature film. There are interesting ideas spread throughout, but nothing is developed enough to turn into anything good and most of the time you don’t really understand what they are going for. Too bad though, the production design had promise.

This is a very dark film and for most of the film there is a distinct lack of color. This makes contrast even more important and shadow detail a must. Unfortunately the blacks are quite sporadic throughout the film and I wonder how much of it was the lensing, or someone who kept shifting their gamma during encoding. Black levels within the frame are back and forth between true black and an elevated gray so much that it was distracting. When the black levels were truly black things looked quite good and the image had a decent level of dimension. But when they elevate them, everything looks crushed. Detail is pretty solid in close ups but is sporadic through the rest of the film.

The soundtrack is presented in English despite being a French production. At first I thought this was going to bother me as I hate dubs but the film was actually produced for the English language track and most of the time you can’t see the speaker’s mouths anyways. The mix is engaging but not overly impressive. The sound design isn’t very original but it does make use of the surround soundstage pretty well. The problem was the lack of ambiance and mood, which was fleeting at best.

The only extra is a standard definition version of the film with the original French dub.

I was hoping for a bit more from this one. Sadly this turned out to be just another forgettable blip for the genre.