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 as something Yelena fusses over.
Payoff: A garment carries a feeling nobody states: 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.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
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.