Elizabeth Harvest is a 2018 thriller about a young woman and new bride who, when left alone in her husband’s vast estate, enters a forbidden room that hides a terrible secret.
There’s a cognitive psychology experiment that says if one looks at a photograph of ten women, nine of whom are nude and one wearing clothes, most will look the longest at the dressed woman, simply because curiosity is more powerful than what’s already known. That’s sort of what lies at the start of Sebastian Gutierrez‘s tricky mind-bender Elizabeth Harvest, where knowing what lies behind a locked door proves harder to resist than what is known behind the others. What follows is a terrifically creepy, often chilling effort from this visionary director in a film that may have some ties to more groundbreaking titles, but nonetheless leaves a lasting and troubling string of questions behind.
READ MORE: We Talk With Director Sebastian Gutierrez About The Making of Elizabeth Harvest
Arriving home on their wedding night, young, beautiful Elizabeth (Abbey Lee) is carried over the threshold by her much older husband Henry (Ciarán Hinds), an extremely wealthy genius who lives in a modern mansion with longtime devoted servants Claire (Carla Gugino) and Oliver (Matthew Beard). Elizabeth is escorted about the stylish home, told all she sees is hers, that she is free to go and do whatever she pleases, her thumbprint a biometric passkey to any room in the house … save for one, at the end of a long dark corridor, illuminated from the inside – and told what’s inside is only for Henry – that she must never enter. Naturally, when Henry takes his leave of her for a business trip, boredom and that irksome curiosity eventually overwhelms her and inside she goes. Big mistake. What she finds inside is nothing short of a hall of horrors.
To even say the name of the movie this might most easily feel influenced by would be to give away perhaps everything, but suffice to say that even as it does feel broadly connected, Gutierrez splits a chasm of separation by style, his bold cross of nostalgic filmmaking and postmodern techno-noir imagery giving this a sensational visual flare. Here’s a director with exceptional patience, trusting his audience to work with some startlingly creative and often symbolic expression, and there’s rarely a moment when it stumbles. It’s cinematic nectar for cinephiles craving challenge.
Like Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining or to a lesser degree, Wes Anderson‘s The Grand Budapest Hotel, Elizabeth Harvest‘s near single set estate is a character all its own, with cold concrete hallways, elaborate windowed sitting rooms, myriad exposed stairwells, and all kinds of corners to get lost in, bright colors and shapes dressing it all in a sort of distressing unease. Gutierrez travels us all about this labyrinthine nightmare with a purposeful pace, one that admittedly settles into a more expositional tone at the midpoint when it literally explains everything up to the minute, which feels a little unnecessary, especially given how well the story is told with its imagery and careful dialogue.
That said, this is a daring, audacious visual experience, Gutierrez, who wrote the screenplay, exploring his narrative with creative and uncompromising sequences that strike with surprising strength. Reminiscent of several experimental films of the 1970s, this feels equally venturous with some genuine twists. Featuring a wonderfully creepy score by Rachel Zeffira and Faris Badwan, Elizabeth Harvest is a violent, sexual scientific dark fantasy with a career-changing performance from Lee. Not to be missed.