NOTE: The below Blu-ray captures were taken directly from the Blu-ray disc.

ADDITION: Criterion Blu-ray (October 2026): Criterion have transferred Jerzy Skolimowski's The Shout to Blu-ray. Mike Molloy’s cinematography makes great use of the coastal setting, with vast sand dunes, wind-blown grasses, and a huge sky that make the characters look small and exposed. The isolation of the landscape suits Crossley’s tales of the outback, and the dunes come to feel like the edge of the known world. The interiors are warm and cluttered by contrast, especially Anthony’s studio, which is full of tape machines and sound-making devices. The Shout comes to Blu-ray from the Criterion from a new 2K digital restoration approved by director Jerzy Skolimowski and director of photography Molloy. The disc is dual-layered, and the feature takes up more than half of it at a very high bitrate, so there is plenty of room for the film’s grain and fine detail. It is framed in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio. The image looks thoroughly film-like. Colors are natural and well saturated without being boosted, from the lush summer greens around the asylum’s cricket pitch and the red-trimmed cricket sweater on Tim Curry to Susannah York’s pale blue eyes and the turquoise ring on her hand. Skin tones are accurate, with a slight, period-appropriate warmth. Close-ups show excellent detail: individual whiskers in Alan Bates’ beard, freckles on John Hurt, and the texture of fabric. The extreme close-up of Crossley’s open mouth, just before the shout, is startlingly sharp. Grain is present and natural throughout. It is heavier in the overcast exteriors, notably the shot of Crossley shouting with arms spread against a grey sky, which looks true to the original photography. Contrast is strong, and black levels are deep while still holding detail in Hurt’s dark shirt and the dim interiors of the house. I saw no damage, scratches, or noise reduction. This is a clean, faithful, and very satisfying 1080P presentation, and the restoration approved by both the director and the cinematographer gives it real authority.

NOTE: We have added 58 more large resolution Blu-ray captures (in lossless PNG format) for DVDBeaver Patrons HERE

On their Blu-ray, Criterion use a DTS-HD master 2.0 track (24-bit) restored from the original soundtrack, in the original English language. The shout itself was a landmark of 70s sound design, and it remains a startling, physical assault on the audience. The theme and incidental music come from Genesis members Anthony Banks and Michael Rutherford, with electronics by Rupert Hine, and they blend into the sound effects so seamlessly that it’s often hard to tell where the score ends and the soundscape begins. That eerie, unsettled atmosphere is a big part of why the film feels so disorienting. Anthony’s experimental recordings come through with eerie precision: a fly trapped in a jar, a bow drawn across metal, the hum of everyday objects. The music blends seamlessly into the effects, as intended. The shout itself is a physical, unnerving blast that the lossless track delivers without distortion. Dialogue is clear throughout, including Bates’ quieter, insinuating delivery. Criterion offer optional English (SDH) subtitles on their Region FREE Blu-ray.

Criterion packs this Blu-ray release with are focused and valuable extras. New interviews with Jerzy Skolimowski and producer Jeremy Thomas run 1/2 hour. They cover the film’s origins in the Robert Graves story, the casting, the challenges of the sound design, and the film’s reception at Cannes, where it shared the Grand Prix du Jury. The most substantial extra is almost an hour of excerpts from Skolimowski’s appearance at the 1997 Midnight Sun Festival in Finland. There, in a relaxed and candid onstage conversation, he discusses his career, from his early Polish work through his years making films in Britain and beyond. On the Set of “The Shout” is a 6-minute UK television program from 1977. It offers a glimpse of the production on location, with footage of the cast and of Skolimowski at work. The package includes a leaflet with an essay by scholar Leo Goldsmith, which is also available on Criterion’s website as “The Shout: Sound and Fury,” and a new cover by Rafa Orrico Díez.

Jerzy Skolimowski, a Polish émigré working in England, approaches English village life the way an anthropologist might. Crossley is a kind of cuckoo in the nest, a figure familiar from Teorema and similar tales of the stranger who disrupts a bourgeois home. Here, though, the threat is primal rather than spiritual. He represents something old and uncontrollable that the civilized couple can’t reason with and, in Rachel’s (Susannah York) case, can’t resist. The Shout is one of the most unsettling and original British films of the 1970s, a puzzle-box study of dread that never settles whether we are watching memory, invention, or madness. Skolimowski (Moonlighting, EO, Night Train, Essential Killing, Deep End) looks at the English village like an outsider, making the cottage, the church, and the cobbler's shop as strange as Crossley's tales of the outback. Alan Bates (The Running Man (1963), The Wicked Lady, The Go-Between, Tommy, Zorba the Greek, The Pumpkin Eater, The Rose, Secret Friends, Impossible Object, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, King of Hearts, An Unmarried Woman, Women in Love, Far From the Madding Crowd, The Caretaker, Georgy Girl, Gosford Park) is superb as Crossley, by turns charming, menacing, and pitiful, and he never reveals whether the man is a sorcerer or simply a very persuasive madman. John Hurt (Alien, Melancholia, Watership Down, I, Claudius, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, 1984, The Limits of Control, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, 10 Rillington Place, Dead Man, Scandal, The Hit, A Man for All Seasons) is a fine match as the composer whose curiosity about sound becomes the very thing that endangers him. Susannah York (Visitors, Images, The Killing of Sister George, Gold, Sands of the Kalahari, Tom Jones, Tunes of Glory, A Man for All Seasons, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, X Y & Zee, The Silent Partner) conveys Rachel's trance-like surrender with very little dialogue, and Tim Curry (Clue, Alice, The Hunt for Red October) is a quietly wry presence as Robert Graves, keeping score at the asylum cricket match. Mike Molloy's (The Hit) cinematography makes the vast coastal dunes feel like the edge of the known world, while the sound design and the electronic score by Anthony Banks, Michael Rutherford, and Rupert Hine turn listening itself into a source of terror. The Criterion Blu-ray offers a superb, film-like 1080P transfer from a 2K restoration approved by both Skolimowski and Molloy, a lossless 24-bit 2.0 surround track that delivers the titular shout in all its unnerving power, new interviews with Skolimowski and producer Jeremy Thomas, almost an hour of Skolimowski at the 1997 Midnight Sun Festival, a 1977 on-set TV program, and an essay by Leo Goldsmith (Keywords in Subversive Film.) A curious and deceptively entertaining film experience. Absolutely recommended! 

Gary Tooze