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Sunday, October 10, 2010

BD impressions: The Disappearance of Alice Creed

3:32 PM / BD Impressions / 3 Comments

Two men soundproof a room, head out, grab a young woman off the street, strip her and tie her to a bed. Oh, and they want a cool two million for her release.

That's about all I'm prepared to say about THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED, a minimalist thriller by first-time feature director J. Blakeson, shot on the Isle of Mann for under £1 million. Blakeson, whose previous credits include contributions to the script for the underwhelming THE DESCENT: PART 2, clearly know's how to rack up the tension and throws enough twists at the audience to ensure that the situation is constantly changing, neatly sidestepping the potential for monotony - a major concern in a film that is basically limited to a cast of three in a single location. It asks for a lot and more importantly GETS a lot from its three actors, with Martin Compston getting the toughest, most complicated role of the three.

The film has been promoted heavily around Alice Creed herself, played by up-and-comer du jour Gemma Arterton, but while she's very good in the role, she may actually be the least impressive of the trio. In what is a very naturalistic film in every sense of the word, her performance comes off a little too much like acting, if that makes any sense. Still, it's a brave performance and a brave film all round, milking every drop out of its limited budget, cast and array of locations, resulting in a film that probably won't set the world on fire but is one of the better British-originated genre offerings I've seen recently.

Image quality: A very impressive-looking disc from CinemaNX, distributed through Icon Home Entertainment (so it's anyone's guess who, if either, deserves the credit here). THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED was shot using Arri's D-21 digital cameras and the image is very detailed with some nice film-like depth of field. There's a bit of video noise in the shadows, and the compression of this is handled very well, avoiding any unpleasant artefacts. I suspect that the image may have been artificially sharpened ever so slightly (there is some very mild haloing around the closing credits text, as well as a bit in Example 15), but this could also be the result of downconversion from a 2K or 4K master, so I'm not going to start pointing any fingers. Suffice it to say that I was very satisfied with the presentation. 9.5/10

This is one of those films where just about any image I choose could potentially constitute a spoiler. Obviously I've done my best to avoid showing anything that REALLY gives the game away, but just in case you'd prefer not to take the risk, I've included the screen captures after the jump below:

The Disappearance of Alice Creed
studio: CinemaNX; country: UK; region code: B; codec: AVC;
file size: 22.5 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 32.31 Mbit/sec

3 Comments

 
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