Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Black Widow
2021 · Cate Shortland · Black Widow 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 the opening credits and try to tell the girls apart. (cutting)
A few wordless minutes carry the whole Red Room backstory in near-monochrome, under a slow cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit. The girls are processed in lines and the cutting keeps them interchangeable on purpose.
Payoff: It is the most assured sequence in the film, and it sets the job for everything after: get two faces out of that mass. In the reading: dividual. The reading calls the Widows a dividual: one feeling spread across many bodies rather than a group of separate people.
Notice how drained of color the 1995 Ohio scenes look. (light)
Gabriel Beristain bleaches the suburban prologue into autumnal melancholy and keeps Budapest and Morocco cool and gritty. Nothing in the picture uses the primary-color register the franchise usually runs on.
Payoff: The look tells you this is a spy film with a memory problem rather than a comic-book adventure.
Watch the fights cut on impact instead of on a pose. (camera)
Beristain shoots hand to hand with handheld, shoulder-mounted coverage in the grammar the Bourne films established. Geography stays readable, but the camera samples ordinary moments of a fight rather than holding a silhouette.
Payoff: Superhero films are built on the held pose. This one runs verite impact cutting through the genre most dependent on it. In the reading: any-instant-whatever. The reading calls this shooting in any-instant-whatevers: motion sampled at ordinary points instead of at the posed, decisive shape.
Watch how often Yelena mentions her vest. (setting)
It starts as a joke about pockets and keeps coming back. By the end it is a thing handed over and kept, and it carries more feeling than any speech in the film.
Payoff: A garment holds the film's actual subject. An assigned family produced attachments nobody meant to produce. In the reading: symbol. The reading calls the vest a symbol: the object that condenses the film's organizing relation into something a person can hold.
Watch Pugh deliver a joke and a wound in one line. (performance)
She plays Yelena deadpan, brittle and genuinely hurt, often inside the same sentence. Johansson plays Natasha weary and valedictory. The film's weight keeps sliding toward the younger sister.
Payoff: Marvel gave a character being written out one last film and a successor walked off with it.
Once you have seen it
Watch the dinner scene where the mission stops advancing. (staging)
Four state assets sit at a table performing a family they were once assigned to play. Shortland lets it run long, in dark comedy and sustained dialogue, with nothing in it moving the plot.
Payoff: The performing is the content. Nobody there is sincere and all of it hurts, and that is the film Shortland actually made.
Notice when the villain becomes a building you can hit. (structure)
For most of the running time the threat is chemical control over other people's wills, which nothing in an action film can punch. The third act converts it into a fortress in the sky and drops it.
Payoff: The form demands that what matters most become hittable before the film can end. The seam is visible.
Compare the Ohio house with the Red Room's corridors. (staging)
One is furnished, warm, suburban and specific. The other is cold institutional geometry with no address. The design keeps setting the two against each other across the whole picture.
Payoff: The house was a cover assignment. What it was covering is the space the film keeps cutting back to.
Watch Harbour play a super-soldier gone to seed. (performance)
Alexei is a Soviet answer to Captain America who has aged into a paunchy braggart reminiscing about a rivalry that may never have happened. Harbour plays the pathos and the buffoonery together.
Payoff: The grand figure comes back as an embarrassment, which tells you what the state did to everyone it built.
Carry this in: Watch the Widows in the background. They are staged as one body with many faces, and the film keeps pulling two out.