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Mute Witness
[Blu-ray 4K]
Blu-ray ALL - United Kingdom - Arrow Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (10th June 2024). |
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The Film
 Saturn Award (Best Horror Film): Mute Witness (nominee) and Best Actress: Marina Zudina (nominee) - Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, 1996 Sitges (Best Film): Anthony Waller (nominee) - Sitges - Catalonian International Film Festival, 1995 Special Jury Prize: Anthony Waller (winner) and Special Mention: Marina Zudina (winner) - Gιrardmer Film Festival, 1996 Nika (Best Producer): Grigory Ryazhsky and Alexander Atanesyan (winner) - Nika Awards, 1995 Mute make-up effects artist Billie Hughes (Gold Diggers' Marina Sudina) is working on a low budget horror film in Moscow with her script supervisor sister Karen (Cold Feet's Fay Ripley) and the latter's director boyfriend Andy (Society's Evan Richards). One night, Billie returns to the studio after wrapping to retrieve some props and gets locked in. Wandering the studio, she stumbles upon the film's camera operator Lyosha (Nautilus' Sergei Karlenkov) and the actor playing the killer Strohbecker (Prisoner of the Mountains' Aleksandr Bureyev) using the film's set after hours to shoot porn films with a woman (Larisa Khusnullina). Just before Billie can interrupt to ask for help, the shoot turns violent and she witnesses Strohbecker stabbing the woman to death on camera. Billie narrowly escapes with her life, but the killers are cunning enough to dispose of the body and utilize both the language barrier with the police and her own effects gags against her so that even Karen and Andy question whether Billie can actually tell the difference between what is real and what is illusion. While the killers have effectively "silenced" her, that is not good enough for the mysterious mastermind known as The Reaper, and Billie's only hope may lie with police detective Larsen (Nostalghia's Oleg Jankowskij) who is ostensibly investigating snuff rings operating out of Russia; but even he may not be what he claims when Billie discovers the killers want more from her than just her life. The feature film debut of animation and music video director Anthony Waller, Mute Witness for a film school graduate is less Hitchcockian and more cleverly riffs on Brian De Palma's distillations with particular but not slavish reference to Blow Out more so than Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-up, starting with the slasher film-within-a-film fakeout played for humor; however, whereas the protagonist of that films were haunted by the possibility of inadvertently capturing murder and obsessively investigated their own creations, Billie is more of a resourceful woman-in-distress as the film veers towards a more traditional chase thriller after the exhilarating first forty-odd minutes. To be fair, this is not the sort of mainstream thriller that could have managed the subtler cat-and-mouse game of Billie continuing to work alongside the killers on a daily basis to catch them out, but the film keeps its momentum for the remainder of the running time through a combination of visceral action and black comedy. The scenes featuring Alec Guinness as "The Reaper" were shot in 1985 at least his angles when Waller ran into the actor in Germany and convinced him to shoot a hastily-written scene an hour before he was to fly out. The "lawless" post-USSR Russia of the nineties opened up to the West including its studios and industry labor; whereas Roger Corman despaired to discover the likes of the once-great studio Mosfilm falling apart, Waller, production designer Matthias Kammermeier (The Noah's Ark Principle), and cinematographer Egon Werdin (Making Contact) revel in the studio location's found clutter and decay, although the rest of Russia largely flits by as a backdrop including a sequence in which Karen and Andy "crash" through Red Square on the way to the studio (the budget truly shows in how obvious it is that both Billie's and Andy's apartments are the same opening film-within-a-film's set rearranged and redressed). Unlike other films involving snuff film-making, this aspect is just the springboard for the chase which includes a McGuffin diskette as a reason for the killers to keep characters alive long enough for them to turn the tables. The results are lopsided but still entertaining and seemed promising. It is unfortunate that Waller's sophomore effort An American Werewolf in Paris was hampered not only by being a sequel to a cult classic but also subjected to heavy interference from the scripting stage onward, and his subsequent output has been so sporadic with the minor treat Nine Miles Down, the noir The Guilty, and the as-yet-unreleased The Piper d featuring Elizabeth Hurley (Kill Cruise) who had been offered the role of Karen in Mute Witness but wanted to play Billie which unfortunately sounds like another franchise-ready horror creation. 
Video
Mute Witness was picked up in most territories by Columbia TriStar although shot in Super 35 production for 2.35:1 matting, the film was released stateside as a fullscreen VHS and a 1.85:1-cropped laserdisc (with 2.35:1 closing credits) and the barebones, anamorphic DVDs released in the and the are more or less identical to the other available Columbia and Sony DVD editions. A new 4K restoration debuted last year at film festivals and then on 4K UltraHD/Blu-ray combo in Germany as a limited edition mediabook, and Arrow's separate 2160p24 HEVC 2.33:1 widescreen HDR10 4K UltraHD and 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.33:1 widescreen Blu-ray editions come from the same restoration. Shot under strenuous conditions, the film has always looked a bit rough around the edges, and even with HDR10, the film's color scheme is never quite as boosted as the old NTSC and DVD masters but are probably truer to the film's intended look and the shooting circumstances given Waller's remarks on the commentary about the lack of available digital corrections back then and his decision not to institute them now with regards to microphone and crew shadows. Some of the close-ups have always seemed invasive but the framing is more or less identical to the SD masters and here one such smudgy extreme close-up is now revealed to be so because it was actually the reflection in a dirty bathroom mirror rather than head on shot it appeared in earlier versions. Fine detail does make itself known look at that previously noisy pattern of Larsen's suit as the camera pushes in ever closer to his face in some of the better lit sequences, but a Hitchcock track/zoom shot will never look good because it was shot with Waller operating the camera on roller skates because the only Russian Steadicam operator managed to not only injure himself on the set but also damage the rig. The Guinness scenes stand out from the surrounding footage not because of differing grain patterns but because the grading looks more naturalistic while the later footage has that slightly bluish hue to the shadows. The optical enlargement of takes to emphasize the looks of fear in two victims upon impending death look fuzzier here simply because of enhanced resolution wheres they melded better into the softness of the SD masters. 
Audio
The sole feature audio option is an LPCM 2.0 uncompressed encoding of the matrixed Dolby Stereo track in which the scoring and sound design come across richly while the particulars of the dialogue track are more evident. The ADR dubbing of Jankowskij by another performer was always evident but it appears that even those rerecorded lines seem to have been a composite of different takes or some trims were done to punch it up while Ripley's occasional accent slips are also more obvious. The scoring of Wilbert Hirsch is richly rendered, but the predominate music cue suggests that the film was temp-tracked with Jerry Goldsmith's then-recent score for Basic Instinct (at least its car chase theme). Optional English SDH subtitles only transcribe the English dialogue, sound effects, and music notations (with Waller noting on the commentary his reasons for not translating all of the Russian dialogue). 
Extras
Extras start off with a new audio commentary by writer/director Anthony Waller who discusses the origins of the project and the intention to shoot in either Boston or Chicago which turned out to be cost-prohibitive and jumping at the prospect of being able to shoot in Russia for a projected million dollar budget that ballooned to double that amount due to corruption as well as delays due to the Russian Constitutional Crisis in October 1993. As interesting as his discussion of the various trickery employed by production designer Kammermeier and cinematographer Werdin in transforming the real studio for the requirements of the script are the constant behind the scenes mishaps, mafia dealings, and drugs Waller notes that Karlenkov being on drugs throughout the shoot actually lent a detached quality to his character and pointing out the various real crew members who played crew members onscreen as well. He notes that Marlee Matlin was offered the lead but turned it down (presumably because she had already played a stalked deaf woman a year or so before in Hear No Evil) as well as some of the other actors offered roles including Leverage's Gina Bellman (who turned down a role because of Russia's diphtheria epidemic) being talked out of playing Andy the director himself, as well as revealing that Jankowskij spoke no English and was voiced instead by radio presenter Pete Drummond. Also included is an audio commentary by production designer Matthias Kammermeier and composer Wilbert Hirsch, moderated by critic Lee Gambin in which Kammermeier reveals that he met Waller in Munich and that it was his small studio that initially inspired the director to write the script as well as providing some more detail to Waller's recollections of shooting the Guinness scene. He also provides more production details about shooting in the Mosfilm studio and augmenting the locations as well as anecdotes about the experience. Hirsch reveals that he had misgivings about people's first impressions about his first major score being the film-within-a-film slasher accompaniment but also discusses with Gambin how he filled in the sound design with musical elements as well as giving the mute protagonist a "voice" including her silent screams. He also reveals that Waller's script was full of precise notations about placement of the score and his ideas for cues.  "The Silent Death: Snuff Films and Mute Witness" (11:33) is a visual essay by author and critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas who places the film in the context of other meta-horror films about horror film sets ranging from the Vincent Price/Peter Cushing film Madhouse and the Italian A Blade in the Dark to the likes of Wes Craven's New Nightmare and Berberian Sound Studio, as well as the genres of "snuff fictions" and "found footage" and how they implicate the viewer (who is sometimes the creator or someone who stumbles upon them) in their creation and thrillers involving disabled characters. "The Wizard Behind the Curtain: Films Within Films and Mute Witness" (23:23) is a visual essay by author and critic Chris Alexander that casts a wider net, covering films (particularly horror films) about snuff, films with fake-out film-within-a-film reveals, and films about filmmaking that play with reality and illusion. "Snuff Movie: Presentation Video" (25:08) was shot around 1992 to attract investors for the film when it was titled "Snuff Movie" Waller is quick to tell the interviewer that the snuff film is just a springboard for the thriller plot providing a more interactive EPK with Waller illustrating his film schooling and his award-winning filmography of animation and shorts including "When the Rain Stops" a genre piece that got VCL video distributor Datty Ruth (The Case of the Jade Scorpion) interested in investing in a feature designer Kammermeir discussing his work on the German science fiction film The Noah's Ark Principle, composer Hirsch who built his own synthesizer early in his composing career, and editor Peter R. Adam (Good Bye, Lenin!) who innovated using early video editors to cut features in Germany. Also on hand is the original Boston location scouting footage (7:30) which shows a similar-looking studio exterior location but empty warehouse interiors that would have been more expensive to fill up than using Mosfilm with its actual sets, props, and wardrobe. The "Alec Guinness Footage" (2:41) offers a look at the raw footage of the shoot and how much work must have gone into cleaning up the unblimped location audio. The disc also includes a teaser trailer (1:09), the theatrical trailer (1:47) and an image gallery. 
Packaging
Both the 4K UltraHD and Blu-ray editions come with a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Adam Rabalais while their first pressing include a double-sided foldout poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Adam Rabalais, and a 20-page liner notes booklet "Seen But Not Heard: A Brief Exploration of Mute Women in Film" by Michelle Kisner (none of which were supplied for review).
Overall
Despite an irresistible premise and an exhilarating half, Mute Witness is ultimately a lopsided but not uninteresting thriller.
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