Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Doctor Strange
2016 · Scott Derrickson · Doctor Strange 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 Strange's hands in every scene. (performance)
Davis shoots the operating theater around fingers doing precise work. After the crash the same hands shake, get braced, get hidden in pockets. Cumberbatch keeps playing the character from the wrists down.
Payoff: A man whose whole identity sits in his hands loses them in the first act. Everything after that is about what replaces them.
Watch how little Strange does while the city folds around him. (staging)
In the chases he mostly runs, clings, and falls. Streets rotate, walls become floors, and buildings close like paper. The choreography belongs to the architecture rather than to any fighter.
Payoff: The action gets its excitement from the environment, not from blows landed. The hero is carried through it more than he drives it. In the reading: movement of world. The reading calls this the movement of world: the figure stops supplying motion and the surroundings move him instead.
Notice the timber, stone, and worn books at Kamar-Taj. (setting)
Charles Wood builds the sorcerers' world out of aged, hand-made materials: courtyards, chained libraries, metal rings worn on the fingers. No screens and no chrome anywhere in it.
Payoff: Magic is presented as an old discipline rather than a technology, which sets this corner of the Marvel films against the Stark workshop look.
Listen for the harpsichord in Giacchino's score. (sound)
The music reaches back to late-sixties psychedelia with plucked keyboards and odd instrument choices, instead of the brass the Avengers films run on.
Payoff: The score dates the character to the era of the comics that made him and keeps the film's magic sounding strange rather than heroic.
Notice how plainly Davis frames the hospital and apartment scenes. (camera)
The drama is shot in warm, steady, centered compositions with ordinary lens behavior. Derrickson saves every trick for the moment space starts bending.
Payoff: The straight photography is what makes the folding work. Impossible geometry keeps the grain of a real place that was actually filmed.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the hands. The film keeps taking motion away from Strange and handing it to the world folding around him.