Arriving as a brand-new VOD release from April 1st, 2019, ELIZABETH HARVEST is a mystery drama in which a newly-wed woman, Elizabeth (Abbey Lee) who is married to the brilliant scientist Henry (Ciaran Hinds) and has been brought, albeit a little groggy, to his magnificent penthouse condominium, with all the hi-tech and luxury a demanding if simplistic woman requires.
Henry reassures her that the place is all hers and accessible thanks to thumb-print identification, save for one particular room, which he informs Elizabeth she must not enter whilst he goes off on official business. However, she has the encouraging presence of Claire (Carla Gugino) who insists she eat, to which Elizabeth requests a light salad and a chocolate milkshake. Another member of staff, Oliver (Matthew Beard) is also on hand to help her adjust to her new extravagant lifestyle.
However, Elizabeth awakes in the small hours and decides to enter the seemingly forbidden room, where a dark secret awakes….
If you are willing to suspend a fair amount of disbelief and buy into the over-wrought dark quality of the narrative, then ELIZABETH HARVEST will certainly be something to cherish. Fans of classic Hammer and Hitchcock coupled with David Cronenberg will take an avid interest in this as well.
Writer/Director Sebastian Gutierrez shows a dab hand at atmosphere and style and does his level best to raise the film to the level of some of those past classics from the examples cited above, but audiences today are pretty savvy about the films they watch – and this is probably the film’s biggest weakness.
It does at times try a little harder than usual to be a little more thought-provoking in terms of what it tries to say, but the dark noir style of the film does tend to overshadow its true potential as a masterwork, given the concept at the centre of the story here.
Where it does score points is in the ensemble cast, especially Gugino as the cautiously supportive Claire and Hinds as the lovingly sinister Henry, coupled with some nifty camerawork from Cinematographer Cale Finot, a rich tapestry of red and black.
