DVD DETAILS:
Vision
The 16:9 enhanced widescreen transfer is serviceable. It particularly emphasizes the appropriately cold and drab textures and reveals that, from the outside, Weller’s brownstone home resembles a castle: a fine trope. In accordance with Weller’s materialist values, the house is neat, orderly and pristine at the outset, the film’s production design gradually charting the descent into disorder and destruction as Weller compulsively destroys what he once made pristine. Cosmatos’ camerawork is frequently elegant in its fluidity and the film features a striking use of reflective surfaces and layered visuals. The extreme macro-lens close-ups of the rat make it seem alien and foreboding (indeed Cosmatos would return to the theme of alien invasion in the later Leviathan, which re-united him with Weller). As expected, the film also makes for startling use of the rat’s point of view, juxtaposing this with that of Weller. The latter stages use handheld camerawork most effectively and the film manages to capture both a sense of immediacy and dramatic distance. It is full of blackly humorous and even slyly allusive moments, as when Weller reads Moby Dick and later watches The Old Man and the Sea on television. The rat’s world between walls is also well established for added ironic parallels, especially when the rat is revealed to reside in a scale model of the very same house Weller inhabits.
Sound
The sound transfer is captivating and consistent in Dolby Digital mono without ever being outstanding. However, it is true to the demands and design of the movie itself. The score is very sparingly used as much emphasis is on the dialogue and in particular in the way emotion and perhaps even passion gradually feature into Weller’s naturally droll and monotonous voice, as he is journeys from being dryly articulate to being single-mindedly inexpressive until finally confronting the object of his obsession. Much of the sound design is naturalistic and understated in ambience, gradually building suspense. Noises are also effectively used to chart the spread of disorder as initiated by the squeaks of the rodent. The exteriors have a sense of an urban cacophony (the outside rat race) but much of the sound design concerns interior spaces and thus the task of conveying Weller’s single-mindedness and subsequent destructiveness within such. The solitude of silence is deceptive and frequently broken. The rat noises are novel enough to measure the meanness of the creature and its final flight into fear as Weller proves a worthy adversary. Weller’s monotone is used for amusing effect in a dinner party scene wherein he starts to recite rat statistics. As the rat even starts to enter Weller’s dreams, so to the sound transfer captures those moments of hallucinatory emphasis and sudden shocking outbursts. read more
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