In the first scene, Elizabeth (Abbey Lee), a dreamy young woman in a wedding dress, is carried over the threshold by her husband, the much older Henry (Ciarán Hinds). The glass house he has brought her to perches in a mountainous isolated landscape. Elizabeth wanders around agog at her new surroundings, at the closet full of clothes fitted just for her. She submits to Henry's grunting sexual needs, staring at the ceiling with open flat eyes, and does her best to ingratiate herself with Claire (Carla Gugino), the mysterious "Mrs. Danvers" of the household, and Oliver (Matthew Beard), Henry's visually impaired son, who glides around noiselessly like a cat. The house is funereal and immaculate. Henry, a Nobel prize winner, warns her not to go into the room in the basement. Elizabeth disobeys, freaking out when she sees a row of cryogenic tanks, filled with her exact replica, submerged in a kind of amniotic fluid. Henry discovers her disobedience and chases her around the house with a huge knife. 

The story loops back and repeats. Dylan Baker, a cop friend of Henry's, shows up on occasion, driving out to the house, asking questions, but other than that, we're stuck in the belljar with the members of the household. The characters' secrets pulse into the air, and at times the atmosphere is so over-charged the whole thing tips over into camp melodrama (and not the good kind).  

The complicated structure of the script is made more so by Gutierrez's stylistic flourishes, some which work better than others. He uses split screens and single-color palettes, along with gigantic closeups of Elizabeth's startlingly blue eyes, fringed by wet eyelashes. The split screens are fun, intensifying the tension as we see Elizabeth hiding from Henry, and Henry in hot pursuit. The single-color scenes seem to signify "flashback", but it comes off as slick affectation. The house is beyond spooky and Gutierrez and his talented cinematographer Cale Finot explore the space with gliding cameras, and almost imperceptible zooms into a vase of flowers, an empty door, the fire in the fireplace. These are eerie choices, giving a sensation of emptiness and dread. 

But the pace is glacial. There is so much explanation necessary to help us understand the basement room that Gutierrez throws in lengthy flashbacks, monologues, plus the discovery of Claire's private diary which details her backstory in a long voiceover sequence. As a character says in Noël Coward 's Hay Fever, "Talk, talk, talk. Everybody talks too much." Bluebeard taps into some pretty primal fears, and these elements are presented in a highly literal way. There's no room for the metaphoric, the emotional or symbolic. "Ex Machina" created a mood where issues of identity, womanhood, personhood, could be explored, all the things present in the original story. "Elizabeth Harvest" instead explains its own plot. This is a tough slog at 105 minutes. 

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