Label: Unearthed Films
Region Code: A
Rating: Unrated
Duration: 60 Minutes
Audio: English DTS-HD MA 5.1, English PCM 2.0 Stereo (No Subtitles)
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (2.35:1)
Director: Adrian Corona
Cast: Bill Oberst Jr., Lori Jo Hendrix, Peter Gonzales Falcon, Manuel DomÃnguez
Dis (2019) from director Adrian Corona is a sixty-minute slice of arthouse dread starring Bill Oberst Jr. (Dismal) who plays an former soldier with a spotty past, first seen wandering the rural landscapes of Mexico, the film is peppered with black and white flashbacks that fill in sparse amounts of information about his checkered past. In the woods I am unsure if he's on-the-run or on-the-prowl, but his journey leads him to a creepy abandoned building, itself a labyrinth of corridors covered in graffiti street art. The place is also home to a mysterious hooded figure that has an unholy penchant for chaining victims to a wall, injecting them with something surely awful and then manually masturbating them to the point of orgasm, then collecting their precious bodily fluids for reasons that are not exactly clear at first.
The film is divided into three chapters spanning only an hour, and in that hour the journey is strange, nightmarish and very slow-burning, with a narrative that is loose to say the least. The film driven by a artful visuals and anchored by a intensely minimalist performance from Bill Oberst Jr., an actor with the sort of storied face that looks to have endured a lifetime of hardship, making his turn here as a broken military man about to receive a reckoning all the more convincing.
The film's title is a nod to Dante’s Inferno, which sort of speaks to the leanings of the film, but I don't want to get too spoilery here, so I won't go much further than that, but honestly this is not a film that you can spoil in my opinion, it's an experience, the sort of thing you let it wash over you, and then you shower the filth away, and there's definitely some filth to be had here, the eye for artful and disturbing imagery on display here is rather impressive.
Audio/Video: Dis (2019) arrives on Blu-ray from Unearthed Films in 1080p HD framed in 2.35:1 widescreen, and is easily one of the most artful and attractive looking films from Unearthed. Shot in Mexico the digitally shot film captures the natural splendor of the forested rural area with lush greens, and the filthy and dilapidated interiors of the abandoned building which features heavily in the film look appropriately disgusting throughout, it's a visually pleasing film, artful an grotesque in equal measure.
Audio comes by way of an English DTS-HD MA 5.1 mix, as well as a PCM 2.0 stereo mix, both are crisp and clean, the immersive design offering some nice use of the surrounds throughout.
Extras include a 2-min introduction by the director, a 19-min short film, and a 5-min interview with actor Bill Oberst Jr. that's unnecessarily split into five parts, plus an image gallery and a selection of Unearthed trailers. Notably, the short film would not play on my LG 4K UltraHD player but played fine on my external Blu-ray.
Special Features:
- Short Film: Portrait (19 min)
- Behind the scenes (3 min)
- Introduction by director Adrian Corona (2 min)
- Interview with Bill Oberst Jr. (5 min)
- Still gallery
- Trailers: Dis (2 min), Atroz (2 min), Torment, Dark Side of the Moon (2 min), Sacrifice (2 min), Where The Dead Go To Die (3 min), Song of Solomon (1 min)
If you're looking for something strange, artfully grotesque and ambitious then Dis (2019) will absolutely fit that bill, plus you get a hypnotic performance from Bill Oberst Jr, and enough nightmare fuel imagery for several films.
