Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Sicario: Day of the Soldado
2018 · Stefano Sollima · Sicario: Day of the Soldado 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 image switch to a thermal, gray overhead view. (camera)
The film repeatedly cuts to drone and thermal optics, reducing people on the ground to heat signatures seen from a viewpoint that belongs to no character.
Payoff: Nobody is actually looking through that camera. It's a feed, watching without a witness attached to it. In the reading: engramme/photogramme. The reading calls this a photogramme: perception cut loose from any human eye, the world registering itself with no one inside to see it.
Notice officials watching violence on a screen. (staging)
The staging keeps cutting between antiseptic rooms where decisions get authorized on monitors and the dusty, bloody ground where those decisions are carried out.
Payoff: The distance between the two spaces is the film's real subject: who gets to stay clean while ordering violence. In the reading: dicisign. The reading calls this a dicisign: the camera perceiving people who are themselves perceiving, through a screen within the screen.
Listen for gunfire landing hard and unglamorous. (sound)
The mix renders weapons fire as a percussive shock rather than an action-movie flourish, paired with a low, building sense of approaching force.
Payoff: Violence here is staged to hit like a blow, not to thrill you.
Watch Graver treat a crisis like a logistics problem. (performance)
Brolin plays him with a casual, almost bureaucratic ease around catastrophe, never raising his temperature no matter how extreme the situation gets.
Payoff: His calm isn't professionalism. It's what total moral indifference actually looks like on a face.
Watch Alejandro's face stay still around the kidnapped girl. (performance)
Del Toro plays a slow thaw of feeling with almost no visible change in expression, letting small shifts do work a speech normally would.
Payoff: You have to watch closely to catch him caring at all, which makes it land harder when you do.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: No one in this film is positioned to be appalled. Watch what happens to violence once nobody is left to witness it as wrong.