Elizabeth Harvest
An old-school sci-fi horror B-movie, which turns out to be an adaptation of Bluebeard. The wetware Ex Machina.
A self-described “simple” girl marries a “brilliant” man and gets taken in arms into his mansion, where torrid offscreen sex occurs. There’s a single room which is off limits (albeit unlocked like the rest of them). After curiosity takes the better of Elizabeth, the man hacks her to pieces for her disobedience, and buries her in the garden.
A few months later, a self-described “simple” girl marries a “brilliant” man and gets taken in arms into his mansion. Similar but slightly different scenes are repeated, but this new Elizabeth is much smarter and manages to kill the man in the fray. She is then helped by the the blind valet and the young governess to evade consequences.
The “governess” has hidden depths, and after being whisked away to the hospital, she leaves her journal for Elizabeth to decipher. We then learn about the all the four Elizabeths, the titular Elizabeth Harvest.
Funded by the man and perfected by the “governess”, the scientific brains of the operation, the clones of his wife are just dead husks in his view, and can only be enlivened by their deaths at his hands.
Soon the “valet” reveals himself as an equal kidnapper, trapping Elizabeth until the journal is read to him. He just wants to make sure the man is just his father, not his clone.
Elizabeth honey traps him, something he would gladly exchange for his life, but she is stopped by the final Elizabeth, fresh off the cryo tank. She is the last Elizabeth standing, getting up to speed to the plot by reading the journal.
Finally, when the “governess” returns to her home, the final Elizabeth rides into the sunset, both free from masculine persecution.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.