Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Sicario
2015 · Denis Villeneuve · Sicario 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
Watch where Blunt is standing when decisions get made. (staging)
Villeneuve puts Kate at the back of briefings, in rear seats, in doorways. She is near the important thing and never inside it. The men decide somewhere else.
Payoff: Her exclusion is built into the blocking, so you feel it before anyone says it out loud. In the reading: crisis-of-the-action-image. This is the reading's stalled action: a competent agent who sees clearly and can change nothing.
Listen for the low brass throb in the opening minutes. (sound)
Jóhannsson's score works in subsonic pulses and percussion rather than melody. It swells under procedure, then drops out, leaving desert silence that feels just as loaded.
Payoff: The dread is delivered to your chest before the plot gives you a reason for it.
Notice how sharp faces are while backgrounds blur into nothing. (camera)
Deakins keeps shallow focus on Blunt's face while the world behind her dissolves. You see her looking with total clarity and see almost nothing of what surrounds her.
Payoff: The lens gives you exactly as much as Kate gets: a clear face and an unreadable world. In the reading: perception-image. The camera watches someone trying and failing to see the whole, which the reading calls perception turned into an argument about knowledge.
Watch Del Toro's eyes and how rarely he raises his voice. (performance)
Alejandro threatens by placement and stillness. He sits, he looks, he waits. Compare it to Brolin's loose, sandaled, joking authority in the same rooms.
Payoff: Two kinds of power sit side by side: one easy and likable, one silent and absolute.
Count how long the border traffic jam runs before anyone fires. (cutting)
Walker lets the gridlock accumulate for minutes, then violence arrives with no transition. Cars, mirrors, fragments of space. No master shot ever tells you the layout.
Payoff: You are denied the vantage a thriller usually grants, so watching closely buys you nothing.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Kate is always at the threshold, never through it. Watch the doorways and you have the whole film.