VIGIL (1984) Blu-ray
Director: Vincent Ward
Arrow Video USA

Young Lisa Peers (Fiona Kay, AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE) lives on a remote New Zealand farm in the middle of a wet valley with her father Justin (Gordon Shields), mother Elizabeth (Penelope Stewart, HARD KNOCKS), and grandfather Birdie (Bill Kerr, RAZORBACK). Known, much to her mother's disapproval as "Toss", tomboyish Lisa spends her days following her father in his farm work, which has lately been subsumed by his obsession with ridding the farm of predatory hawks ("The only good hawk is a dead hawk," his daughter parrots). While trying to rescue one of his sheep, Justin is killed in a fall and his body is carried back by drifter Ethan (Frank Whitten, HOT TARGET) who ingratiates himself into the family as a farmworker through Birdie who has his own ideas about running the farm and resents his daughter for wanting to sell it and move to the city where she hopes to make Lisa more ladylike starting with ballet classes. Perched watchfully over the farm in his caravan taking out prey and food with "silent bullets", Ethan is as frightening a figure to Lisa as a fascinating one as she comes to believe that he has magic while also still suspecting that he murdered her father, has befriended her grandfather who seems to want Ethan to take Justin's place in every manner, including seducing Lisa's mother.

An avowed admirer of Werner Herzog, director Vincent Ward makes the landscape of the film more of a character than the performers whose characterizations and motivations are secondary in the progression of the film in which it is there movement through the compositions of future Peter Jackson D.P. Alun Bollinger (HEAVENLY CREATURES) – assisted by Stuart Dryburgh who later shot Jane Campion's THE PIANO – and physical actions that are more important than the dialogue, overshadowed as it is by the scoring of Jack Body (RAIN OF THE CHILDREN); indeed, the film is most heavy-handed when at is most verbose in trying to force the association of Ethan with the hawks (and Justin's death as a result of upsetting the balance of nature) or the pedophilic implications of the relationship between Ethan and Lisa (and her mother's possible jealousy and feelings of being prematurely aged). The film belongs to a string of seventies and eighties films in which a child's discovery of the fragility of life combined with the most nascent stirrings of sexual awareness takes on horrific forms – a sequence shot from Lisa's POV through the sight of a rifle hints at feelings of resentment about her mother as much as her hatred of Ethan – from the likes of the Australian CELIA to the American Midwest-set but British-lensed THE REFLECTING SKIN.

Unreleased in the United States theatrically or on video, VIGIL comes to 1080p MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 Blu-ray from an HD master that is somewhat inconsistent in its rendering of detail and color for this film production in which the predominant mossy greens look boosted and the browns almost black while other saturated colors look subdued (not unlike the early domestic digital transfer for THE PIANO compared to the later European 4K restoration). The film was shot in 16mm but the lesser grain here may be indicative that the blow-up element has not been utilized while some light filtering has also been applied. It does not detract from the visual beauty of the film for those of us seeing it for the first time (presumably Umbrella will utilize the same master when they announce their Blu-ray since they have also announced their own editions of THE NAVIGATOR and THE QUIET EARTH, the former forthcoming from Arrow in the US and the UK while the latter is a UK-only title since it has been licensed by Film Movement in the US). The LPCM 1.0 mono track sounds great in terms of the music score, with the low key delivery of much of the dialogue (apart from a couple blowups from Elizabeth and Birdie) and the predominance of natural sounds in the environment over human activity. Optional English SDH subtitles do transcribe all of the dialogue.

Although Ward's participation is limited to the archival extras, the disc does include an appreciation by film critic Nick Roddick (13:22), a journalist who was in New Zealand to do a story on the New Zealand Film Commission and had the opportunity to see a rough cut of VIGIL. Although he admits now that he may have been exaggerating in calling it the best debut feature, he championed the film in its UK release and its screening at Cannes and spends part of the time discussing the particular social and financial circumstances that put New Zealand cinema on the map in the eighties (including such films as SLEEPING DOGS and THE QUIET EARTH). His appreciation of the film includes his feelings about the sexual nature of the story in light of current events, and he is probably not wrong in that both modern audiences and cinema's movers and shakers might find the grist for the mill that is the sexual awakening of young characters even portrayed indirectly or metaphorically as problematic (one need not look any further than the drawn out and more overtly "gothic" miniseries version of PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK). Vintage extras include an on-set report from the long-running New Zealand television program "Country Calendar" (14:18) which focuses largely on the employment and economic benefits brought to the area by the production, including the renting of the farm location that its owner found unsuitable for the very atmospheric conditions that attracted Ward. Also included is an extract from a 1987 Kaleidoscope television documentary on New Zealand cinema (7:29) focusing on the film and director Ward, along with the film's theatrical trailer (2:14). Not provided for review is the illustrated collector s booklet featuring new writing on the film by critic Carmen Gray. (Eric Cotenas)

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