The story is about a troubled corpse that causes a lot of mind-boggling problems for peaceful neighbors in New England.
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I remember a couple of years ago when I first watched this picture, I stopped watching it at the 10th minute. I couldn’t understand how Hitchcock could make such an absurd film. You have to exchange pleasantries when there’s a corpse under your feet. Oh, well, time has passed and our blue screens are showing this strange (strange, to say the least) film again. Of course, by the second viewing I was ready to watch the picture to the end, it’s Hitchcock, the author of my favorite “Yard Window” and “Psycho”, he just can’t make a bad movie.
As a matter of fact, in the beginning I was bursting with laughter, like the whole movie, but at the same time the film opened for me as a very entertaining and very clever comedy detective. Well, just think, what other director can show a blatantly criminal detective in a comedic way, and without any jokes. The humor here goes by itself, it appears somewhere from within, just like the fear in “Psycho” and the anxiety in “Window to the Yard”. This was the master of Hitchcock, not to frighten, not to make the viewer laugh explicitly. His films are designed to affect the viewer is not from the screen, but from the gut of the man himself, that is the genius of Grandpa Alfred′s films.
In fact, cinema is, at first glance, an extremely absurd idea. Through the strange and also dead character Harry, to show all the inhabitants of that nice and very picturesque neighborhood. This Harry not only lifts the veil of mystery over all the secrets of the residents, but also helps everyone find peace and happiness. And who says dead people are useless? Through the processes of digging and burying, the residents discover not only in themselves, but also in others something new. So by the end, they are already associated as one big family, where there are no secrets and everyone knows everything about each other.
Some people compare this film to the work of the Coen Brothers, but I was reminded of “Blue Velvet” by David Lynch. I am reminded of it not only because the main characters wear blue dresses. The basic ideas of these films are very similar. Imagine what Blue Velvet would have looked like if it had been made as a comedy, exactly in that style. In “Blue Velvet,” the characters try to figure out who the ear belongs to, which causes them to dive into an ocean of problems and secrets of other past outsiders. Both films are about not taking everything literally, sometimes you have to look closer, look a little further than you should, and then you’ll discover things you never knew existed. Also, upon closer inspection, unremarkable characters turn out to be very remarkable (to say the least), though of course there is no Frank Booth here, who breaks all the norms of decorum and acts as an overt sociopath, but the movie shows that such a Booth, though not the type, lives in all of us. At the right moment we are all ready to do anything, whether digging a hole or burying it, breaking and twisting the norms of society and the law in our own interests, in our hearts we all don’t give a damn about the law. That Booth could well have been Harry himself, when he dragged the old woman into the bushes thinking she was his wife, or when he abused his wife, who was also his brother’s wife. Or the wife herself, who in no way hindered this marriage, surely wanted it herself (here she rather resembles Dorothy), and afterwards rejoiced that he was dead and asked him to bury the body. Every one of the characters can match him in some way.
The movie is about human idiocy. A man saw a corpse and for some reason decided that, precisely, he had killed him, though he himself did not bother to find out what the wound was from. Other passersby, passing by, either do not notice the corpse, in fact they do not notice anything at all, or they simply spit on it, it’s just a body in the woods. And the endless stream of new data makes the heroes, then dig up, then dig down for no good reason. In fact, very reminiscent of the usual everyday actions of people. It is worth to learn something new and here you already rush headlong, without proper checking and elementary unwinding of balls inside your head, like a bull on red matter, but at the first news that all this is groundless you immediately change and rush headlong again, but already in another direction. In short, we’re all children of a civilization of one-man-shows, who think only of themselves, and only for a short time: “I’ll go, cover it with branches and then forget it”-without looking even five minutes ahead and without any interest in their neighbor. And that poor Harry and the endless process of digging and burying is like therapy and homework on “How to Live in Society,” because, as the cat Matroskin said, “Working together, it unites.”
Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (75.3 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: HDR10
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Audio
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: Dolby Digital 2.0
French: DTS 2.0 Mono
German: DTS 2.0
Italian: DTS 2.0
Japanese: DTS 2.0
Subtitles
English SDH, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish.
