The Netflix algorithm really needed me to see Elizabeth Harvest. Like, A Lot.
It casually offered it up at first, like a bright eye vegan friend offers their flourless carob and courgette cookies. But then the offers became pleas, constant entreaties to chow down on the gritty discs of inevitable disappointment.
Eventually, things got awkward.
I gave in.
The movie itself seems to be the product of similar algorithmic process to those that served it up to me, some machine learning AI ignorant of all things in the world but Ex Machina and The Duke of Burgundy churned away in the cloud. Eventually, a server farm in Ukraine ejected this dead-eyed simulacrum into the internet and thence to my jaded eyes.
Ciaran Hinds and Carla Gugino deliver their performances with a level of professional adequacy the whole fails to earn. Much of the heavy lifting falls on Lieutenant Commander Data, as a blind plot twist, and a 90s CG supermodel as the titular Elizabeth.
Sadly, 90s CG supermodel is limited by the technology of her times and fails to make it across uncanny valley, inflecting everything with a creepy unreality that never feels deliberate.
The plot is workmanlike guff with delusions of grandeur and the anachronistic stylisation never quite convinces. There is something there, glimmering faintly like the proverbial ghost in the machine but ultimately it is neither clever enough to fascinate nor joyful enough to truly entertain.
Verdict: 3 occasionally entertained cates