Mother! 4K UHD (2017)

[Geoff D]

mother! is an incredible film (you know something's managed to speak to you when you're still mulling it over days later) but what about dat dere UHD disc? The movie was shot primarily on Super 16 with 35mm and RED used for VFX plates and exteriors, Aronofsky wanting something that had a prominent sense of texture and DP Larry Fong noted that modern 35mm stocks are so clean (to compete with digital) whereas using 16mm would be an "automatic read" for the grain.

So, yeah. This thing has grain by the truckload, but what's interesting about the comparison between Blu-ray and UHD in HDR10 is how it looks finer and more regimented on the Blu-ray. Not that it still isn't plenty grainy in 1080p SDR but it looks tidier and more polished, almost 35mm-like which is probably why when I first saw Aronofsky's The Wrestler on Blu I assumed it was 35mm that had been grunged down a bit (it's not, it's Super 16 just like this and Black Swan). But on the 2160p (2K upscaled) HDR version the grain is coarser and livelier, bringing with it a more intense feeling of texture and the detail somehow looks tighter despite the grain being more overt. Not that 16mm is going to give you boundless sharpness yet the image just looks sharper anyhow on the UHD.

I really liked the application of dynamic range, it's not one to show off to friends and neighbours and yet it brings back a significant amount of information vs the SDR Blu-ray nonetheless. This production wasn't shot on a soundstage, they used a real location with real backdrops outside each window and the SDR version loses that feel because so much highlight detail is burned out on the windows. It feels more hemmed in, more stagey, whereas whenever you see out of the windows on the UHD you can really SEE out of the windows, you know? This is what I've meant before about HDR bringing back "realism" to an image despite other aspects of it being decidely "unreal", like the heavy grain in this case. Those two aspects of a presentation don't necessarily have to be at loggerheads with each other. The shots when the screen "whites out" at various moments look proper bright in HDR, too.

Couple of photos, most of the time this was a 'mare to try and get a photo of so don't pay too much attention to the brightness of the surrounding areas, just look at the windows which have not only more range but more colour. Something I also liked was that the grain was still very much visible in those brighter areas on the UHD whereas it gets nuked away on the SDR, I guess that's also what contributes to the 1080p feeling a bit more polished and a bit slicker in terms of conventional picture quality attributes.

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The black levels have been brought up quite a bit vs the SDR Blu-ray which has dense, detail-sucking darkness but is more of a milky greyness on the UHD. You get more shadow detail on the UHD for sure like on people's hair and clothing, and the movie was actually shot underexposed for the first two acts so milkyness like this is truer to that intent. But for the third act they wanted more contrast and punch while the UHD maintains that greyness which I'm not sure was the way to go. And yet given how much I detest this trend for thin black levels I never felt it was a major issue during the film, it's got such a stylised look anyway that it still seems to work.

Compression doesn't suffer for the more bountiful grain, quite the opposite: I reckon the improved temporal compression is likely what helps the UHD's image look tighter and more focused than the BD's. With sources like this you're always having the grain fight the detail during the encoding, for as good as AVC is it sometimes comes off second best but with HEVC well applied you can have both a grainier presentation and finer retention of detail. No banding to report either.

Not a disc for grainophobes to go hunting down then but it's got a surprisingly effective and naturalistic HDR presentation.