Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Prisoners
2013 · Denis Villeneuve · Prisoners on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice that it is raining or wet in nearly every exterior. (light)
Deakins never stages a downpour for drama. Rain is a cold fact on roofs, roads, and jackets, under a low overcast that leaves faces flat and unflattered.
Payoff: The weather takes the glamour out of every close-up, so you look at these people the way the film does, without shelter.
Watch for vertical lines splitting the frame: trunks, fences, slats. (camera)
Bare Pennsylvania trees, chain link, the RV's siding, doorjambs. Deakins keeps putting a bar of something between you and a face, and often obscures half of it.
Payoff: Confinement is built into the compositions. You are being taught to see everyone as held somewhere.
Look for maze drawings on paper, walls, and objects. (setting)
They turn up in children's hands, scratched on surfaces, and in the shape of the spaces themselves. Villeneuve never has a character explain them.
Payoff: Everyone in the story believes they are moving toward an exit. The drawings quietly tell you they are tracing circles. In the reading: symbol. The reading calls the maze this film's symbol: one repeated figure condensing the trap every character is already inside.
Listen for the low drone under scenes that have no music. (sound)
Johannsson works in sub-bass and dense low strings with no melody to resolve. He drops to near-silence, then the next ordinary sound lands like an event.
Payoff: The score sets the temperature rather than the emotion. It never comforts you and it never finishes a phrase.
Watch Gyllenhaal's eye blink while Loki holds himself still. (performance)
The detective is built from small fixed details: tattoos up the neck, a buttoned collar, a twitch that arrives when he is containing something. Jackman beside him is all barely held energy.
Payoff: Two men are being characterized entirely through control. One keeps a lid on, one is losing it, and neither says so.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch what Keller does with certainty. The film hands him every tool an action hero needs.