It’s been a little over a decade since Elijah Wood shed his tousled curls, bid farewell to New Zealand and finished the Lord Of The Rings trilogy. Yet to all but a few hardcore Happy Feet fans, he’s still best known as Frodo Baggins. Only a complete career reinvention can distance an actor from a role that iconic, and if playing a football firm recruit in Green Street couldn’t free Elijah from the spectre of Middle-earth, then maybe nothing can.
But in recent years, Wood has spun an unlikely sideline as a patron of grisly genre cinema. In 2010, he co-founded SpectreVision, an independent horror studio. Since then, he’s produced movies as eclectic as Iranian vampire western A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, laptop-based techno-thriller Open Windows, and schoolyard gorefest Cooties. He also accepted the starring role in Maniac, perhaps the most graphic horror film of the past 10 years, singlehandedly ensuring the film would get made.
Most of Wood’s genre projects haven’t made it over to the UK yet, but one did sneak out on DVD this week. Grand Piano sees Elijah play Tom Selznick, a prodigious concert pianist suffering from stagefright after a disastrous performance of a supposedly unplayable piece. Five years later, he returns to the stage – and to the piece – only to find a gruesome warning etched on to his sheet music: PLAY ONE WRONG NOTE AND YOU DIE.
It’s a silly premise, but one which Spanish director Eugenio Mira weaves with all the style of a Hitchcock thriller. Filled with striking split-focus shots, dynamic tracking movements and hypnotically long takes, Grand Piano is a welcome antidote to the handheld cameras and dodgy visual effects of some contemporary thrillers. Even as Tom’s mysterious assailant begins spouting lines that would make a Bond villain cringe, the movie itself retains perfect composure. Elijah, meanwhile, never hits a wrong note.
Icon Home Entertainment, DVD
Also out this week
Maleficent Subversive Sleeping Beauty reboot.
Northern Soul Feelgood 70s dance romp.
Walking On Sunshine Low-rent jukebox musical.
20,000 Days On Earth Avant garde Nick Cave doc.
