Review: Elizabeth Harvest
"I dreamt I would meet a brilliant man. I would steal his breath away and he in turn would steal me away from everything ugly into a secret world of our own." The beginning of Elizabeth Harvest feels like a dream or a fairy tale, but there's a foreboding horror lurking from the start in this twisty sci-fi gothic romance from director Sebastian Gutierrez.
Elizabeth (Abbey Lee) is newly wed, still garbed in her wedding gown as she and her husband Henry (Ciarán Hinds) arrive at his palatial home. She is young, dreamy, trusting, not quite fully formed. He is older, wealthy, cultured, and controlling. "Why would he pick a girl like me to marry? I'm very...simple," she wonders. Yet, how difficult it must be for such a girl not to be intoxicated by this Prince Charming who showers her with luxury. Everything in this house, whose rooms are equipped with high-tech devices such as fingerprint locks, and everything he has shown her - the art, the jewels, the clothes, the money in the safe, all of it - is hers, he assures her. Everything, that is, except a room in which he, a scientist, does his work and which he makes her promise never to enter.
Of course, what is forbidden is the most irresistible so when he goes away on business the next day and dismisses his staff, consisting of the Mrs. Danvers-like Claire (Carla Gugino) and the blind twentysomething Oliver (Matthew Beard), Elizabeth winds up going into the one off-limits room in the immense and secluded estate. What she discovers there is cause for tremendous alarm. Even more terrifying is Henry's punishment for her disobedience: hacking her to death with a machete. This is all within the first 20 minutes of Elizabeth Harvest, and is but an appetiser to a main course that owes as much to Brian De Palma as it does to Italian giallo in terms of visual style and Bluebeard in terms of narrative.
It's difficult to discuss the rest of the film without treading into spoilers; suffice it to say that much of the plot is hinted at in the film's title. Though one may believe the story is going one way - Claire, for example, is not the menacing Mrs. Danvers she initially appears to be - Gutierrez upends expectations, perhaps one too many times as, at a certain point, the twists convolute an extremely intriguing premise. Particularly problematic is the film's exposition-filled second half, during which the film's already deliberate pacing becomes a detriment. Still, this section is worth the slog if only for a bone-chilling monologue delivered by Hinds that offers unsettling insight into why he kills the one he loves.
Elizabeth Harvest
Directed by: Sebastian Gutierrez
Written by: Sebastian Gutierrez
Starring: Ciarán Hinds, Abbey Lee, Dylan Baker, Carla Gugino, Matthew Beard
