{Blu-ray Review} Really Classy Stuff: Snapshot (1979) on Indicator Blu

“Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.”

Writing in the booklet that accompanies the new high-def Blu from Indicator, Ian Barr describes Snapshot as trafficking in “the free-floating dread of existing in the skin of an attractive woman in the late seventies” and “the way in which that sense of ambient threat is exponentially increased when one’s image is recorded, reproduced, and exploited – though not necessarily in that order.”

Nominally a thriller, Snapshot was released internationally hard on the heels of John Carpenter’s classic Halloween and marketed with a variety of extraordinarily misleading titles including The Night After Halloween, The Day After Halloween, and even The Day Before Halloween. One can only imagine that these monikers would have annoyed 1979 audiences to no end, as there is precious little similarity between a film like Snapshot and Carpenter’s proto-slasher.

Here, the body count is virtually nonexistent, the villain unknown, and the terror comes from that “free-floating dread” that Barr mentions. In spite of a grisly and effective cold opening that acts as a flash forward to show where the movie must inevitably end up, there are no real horror set pieces in Snapshot. There isn’t even much stalking. Yet it absolutely feels like a horror picture through and through, part of an obvious lineage shared with Italian giallo films and women-in-peril movies galore.

Anchoring the film is Sigrid Thornton, in what probably should have been a star-making turn as Angela, a hairdresser who is talked by her glamorous friend and client into taking a modeling gig that will require her to pose topless.

Reading reviews of Snapshot online, one will quickly find many commentators opining (not incorrectly) that the movie loses steam in its second half, once the machinery of the plot is fully underway. They’re not wrong, but even as it does, Thornton’s incredible performance kept me riveted. Much has been made (not wrongly) of the work that Mia Goth did in X and Pearl, but here Thornton was doing it decades before, and to much less acclaim.

It doesn’t hurt that the filmmaking in Snapshot is frequently breathtaking. From the aforementioned cold open to the credits showing over scenes of forensic teams at work to the use of still images – the snapshots of the title – to an absolutely wonderful montage of the photoshoot itself, filmed without dialogue and scored entirely by a song written for the movie and performed by the band Sherbet, there are innumerable moments throughout Snapshot that just work, keeping the film’s momentum going even when the story might otherwise sag.

This may seem surprising, when one considers that it is the feature directorial debut of Simon Wincer, whose later filmography includes Free Willy, Lonesome Dove, Operation Dumbo Drop, and Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles, among others. Making things even weirder, Wincer himself isn’t particularly fond of the film. Quoting an interview that Wincer recorded for the Ozploitation documentary Not Quite Hollywood, Barr’s essay describes his reaction as follows: “I’m proud of everything I’ve done, but probably least proud of this one.”

In fact, there’s a lot in Snapshot’s pedigree that feels noteworthy. It was co-written by Everett de Roche (Patrick, Razorback) and produced by “ocker Roger Corman” Antony Ginnane, both of whom will be familiar names to those who have already checked out my earlier review of the Indicator Blu-ray of Patrick. Another Patrick alum is composer Brian May, whose scores are somewhat inextricably linked to Ozploitation cinema, thanks to having composed the music for George Miller’s Mad Max.

Nor is May (who is doing his best Pino Donaggio imitation here, and it’s pretty good) the only name from Mad Max to show up in Snapshot. Hugh Keays-Byrne plays the odd duck photographer here, turning in another of several standout performances in the film. He had previously played Toecutter in Mad Max but, much weirder for modern audiences, he also played Immortan Joe in Miller’s many-years-later sequel/reimagining, Mad Max: Fury Road.

One can’t discuss the standout performances in Snapshot without also bringing up Chantal Contouri, who turns in a delightfully brittle depiction of Angela’s blasé and at times domineering friend Madeline. And one can’t talk about Madeline without giving away spoilers for the film’s nested twist endings, so feel free to stop reading now if you’d like to see this remarkably stylish and effective thriller cold.

It will come as no surprise to modern audiences when Madeline expresses her attraction to Angela. Indeed, the seeds of it have been planted early on. And though Angela rebuffs her, they seem to remain friends, at least at first. In his essay, Barr writes that the relationship between Madeline and Angela “presents one of the few instances of genuine, non-transactional human connection in the film,” but he seems to be reading Madeline in too generous of a light.

Wincer puts it much more bluntly, in an interview also included in the booklet accompanying the Blu. “I do think Madeline has motivation, and that was she wanted Angela, and would do anything to get her.” If anything, Madeline’s friendship with Angela is every bit as transactional as any other in the film, the gender-flipped version of the “friendzoned” so-called “nice guy” who befriends the girl in order to get in bed with her.

It is because of this, in part, that the nested twists are among the weakest links in the film, a fact that Wincer attributes to rushed post-production and cuts to the script. “Originally there were five guilty parties,” he says in the interview, “and now there are three and a half.”

For modern audiences, Madeline’s occupation of the trope of the sinister, jilted lesbian is one that will probably rankle, though it’s hard to take too much umbrage at it when both Contouri and Thornton play their characters with such vulnerability. After all, virtually everyone else in Angela’s life is preying on her, male and female alike, why should Madeline be any different?