Film
Journalist Nicole Rawlins (Sophie Cookson – Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Kingsman: The Secret Service) convinces her boss to let her travel on assignment, so investigate a possible case of murder after a young girl dies during an exorcism. When she comes in contact with Father Anton (Corneliu Ulici) more and more inexplicable events occur. The pair begin to believe that the priest lost the battle with a demon.
Inspired by actual events, one would expect tension and fear, from The Crucifixion, but sadly these are not present. The story is interesting, and Cookson gives an endearing performance, but even that is not enough to pull the film to the next level.
The story is rather straight forward, and even the smallest of reveals become obvious to the viewer before the characters themselves figure these out.
The Crucifixion missed a few opportunities, given the likely source material, and where it could have been a frightening horror, instead it forgoes that for a bit more drama. Just not enough. A run of the mill film, that could have been much more. Another of many in recent times that is best reserved for an afternoon in the home cinema.
Disc
Overall, the disc is of a good technical quality, with a rather average feature.
The Crucifixion is available now, to purchase on disc, in South Africa.
Video
Video is encoded at a high average bitrate, with no visible artefacts on-screen. There is no visible colour bleed, and a fair amount of detail in darker scenes.
Viewers with the necessary hardware or software could scale up to a larger or higher resolution screen, should they wish.
Audio
Audio is encoded at a high average bitrate, and presented in a Dolby Digital 5.1 Mix. Dialogue is clear via the centre channel, with the weight of the soundtrack put on the front channels. The surround channels are used mostly to expand the on-screen world, in the hopes of further drawing the viewer into the story.
Navigation
Navigation is simple, with a static main menu, accompanied by background music. There are text links to play the main feature, and to a scene selection sub-menus.
The scene sub-menus each contain six abysmally small, motion, colour thumbnails, for a total of twelve chapters. Given the low resolution of DVD media, compared the most forms of movie consumption these days, this is a rather pathetic oversight. Adding to this, while the thumbnails are numbered, they are not labelled, so making navigation to any part of the film near impossible, and the disc would have been better off not wasting the space needed for this, rather leaving that space for the main feature, allowing it to have a higher bitrate.
Bonus Features
There are no bonus features on the disc, other than trailers for Amityville: The Awakening, Drone, and Voice from the Stone that autoplay at the beginning of the disc.
While these trailers can be skipped, or fast forward, individually, they can not be accessed again via the disc navigation menu.
Packaging
Packaging is fairly standard, with with a poster and title on the front. The back has a few screen grabs from the film, and something that is supposed to be a synopsis, but is more like a short logline. The usual technical information is present too.
