Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Andhadhun
2018 · Sriram Raghavan · Andhadhun 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 what sits in the background behind Akash. (camera)
The camera never uses his eyeline, so Mohanan stages in depth instead. Objects and figures sit unremarked behind the foreground conversation. The suspense comes from composition rather than cutting.
Payoff: You see what the scene refuses to point at. The frame keeps handing you information the people inside it are not sharing.
Notice when a thriller would cut to a reaction and does not. (camera)
Mohanan holds on Khurrana's flat, unfocused gaze at exactly the moments another film would show somebody registering a shock. Mirrors, glass doors, and reflections keep catching people anyway.
Payoff: The missing reaction shot is the suspense engine. You are left doing the reacting that the film declines to do for you.
Listen for cane taps, cutlery, footsteps, a phone ringing wrongly. (sound)
Sound carries facts the image withholds. Daniel B. George keeps the score restrained and lets the piano do the work. Akash's playing bleeds out into the score and back in again.
Payoff: The soundtrack runs as a second channel alongside the picture. Half of what you learn in this film arrives through your ears.
Watch how calmly Tabu handles a household problem. (performance)
Simi underplays everything. She treats a crisis as administration, keeps her voice level, and lets comic timing do the menacing. Tabu had rarely been asked for this register before.
Payoff: The deadpan is what makes her frightening. Nothing in her manner escalates, so you cannot tell how far she will go.
Look at the memorabilia on the walls of Sinha's flat. (setting)
Anil Dhawan plays a faded seventies actor, and the flat and the soundtrack are furnished with Dhawan's own back catalog. Real recordings from that era sit inside the contemporary mix as a foreign body.
Payoff: The nostalgia is handled with affection and coldness at once.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the background of every shot. The frame carries information the people in it do not share.