Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch As Above, So Below
2014 · John Erick Dowdle · As Above, So Below on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 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
Watch the edge of the lamp beam, not the middle. (camera)
Every light source in the tunnels is one a character is carrying. The cone catches a few feet of stone and the frame's edges go black. Dowdle stages almost everything just outside that cone.
Payoff: You are only ever shown what a person's lamp happens to find, so the dark stops being empty and starts being occupied. In the reading: out-of-field-relative. The dark past the beam is what the reading calls the relative out-of-field: more corridor you could walk into, if you dared.
Notice that every shot comes from a camera someone is wearing. (camera)
There is no outside view anywhere in the film. Helmet cams and handhelds carry all of it, so the picture is always somebody's looking. Often you ride Benji's camera while watching him watch.
Payoff: With a camera on everyone, no single witness holds the space together, and you never get a shot that would let you draw a map. In the reading: perception-image. The reading calls this the perception-image: the basic unit is not the tunnel but a person's view of it.
Listen for how voices deaden in the tightest passages. (sound)
Keefus Ciancia's score stays low and textural, so most of what frightens you is dripping water, groaning stone, scraping, and breathing. Rock swallows the echo when a passage narrows.
Payoff: Your ears tell you the size of a space your eyes cannot see, which is how the film buries you alive without showing you the walls.
Look at the walls. They are stacked with real skulls and femurs. (setting)
The Dowdles got permission to shoot inside the actual Paris ossuary, where there is no electricity. The bone architecture in frame is municipal, stacked by workers starting in the 1780s.
Payoff: The horror is furniture the production found rather than built, and that documentary credit is what later buys your belief in an impossible descent.
Watch the actors' breathing as they wedge their bodies through rock. (performance)
Perdita Weeks, Ben Feldman and Edwin Hodge play exhaustion and oxygen debt more than they play character. They carry their own cameras while crawling, and the strain is on their faces because the location was real.
Payoff: Duration here is carried by posture and breath rather than plot, which is why the crawl scenes feel longer than they are.
Once you have seen it
Look for objects that could not possibly be underground. (setting)
A telephone rings. A piano sits in the stone. A car burns. None of these arrive with dialogue or an explanatory cut. They simply appear, and the film never accounts for them.
Payoff: An object pulled out of its usual chain stops being readable by habit, so you have to start interpreting instead of recognizing. In the reading: demark. The reading calls the ringing telephone a demark: a thing wrenched out of its series so habit cannot read it.
Mark the exact point where the tunnel stops being a tunnel. (structure)
Between the ossuary and the carved stone gate the space changes category. No cut marks it. No line announces it. Elliot Greenberg's intercutting between helmet cams has already unmade your sense of where anyone is.
Payoff: The film refuses to stamp the threshold, which is the only way to shoot a crossing into somewhere no camera could pan to.
Count the shots that show the group a route back up. (cutting)
There are none. The descent is assembled as a one-way spiral. Lamps fail and take the frame with them, and each recovery puts everyone lower than before rather than back where they started.
Payoff: The cutting turns a moral idea into geology. The only direction the edit permits is down, and it never offers you relief.
Carry this in: Watch the edge of the beam, not the middle. The middle holds the scares. The edge is where the film is thinking.