Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Better Man
2024 · Michael Gracey · Better Man 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 how no one in the film reacts to the chimpanzee. (staging)
Robbie Williams appears throughout as a photorealistic CG chimp while everyone else is human, and the film never explains or winks at the choice.
Payoff: The film builds its own version of the man rather than filming the real one. In the reading: Crystalline description. Deleuze calls an image that composes its own object rather than referring to a real one a crystalline description, which is this whole film.
Watch for a single unbroken shot moving down a crowded street. (camera)
The Rock DJ sequence travels with a growing crowd of dancers along a shopping street in what plays as one continuous take.
Payoff: The number is the film's confidence trick: if this can hold together, so can the whole conceit.
Watch the human actors talk to the chimp like he's ordinary. (performance)
Steadman and Pemberton play scenes with the ape exactly as they would with a person, never once breaking the illusion with a reaction shot.
Payoff: Their belief is doing most of the work of making you believe it too. In the reading: The gest. Deleuze borrows the term gest for a bodily attitude that shows a relation instead of stating it, exactly what these actors are doing.
Notice the shift from drab kitchens to neon stage lighting. (light)
The film moves visually from a working-class Stoke childhood, plain and unglamorous, to the saturated neon abstraction of pop stardom.
Payoff: The palette tracks his distance from where he started, long before the story says so.
Listen for which song plays under which moment in his life. (sound)
The soundtrack reworks Williams's own catalog and maps specific songs onto specific life events rather than reproducing them as concert footage.
Payoff: Familiar hits pick up new biographical weight every time one lands on a scene.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the humans, not the ape. Their belief is what makes the whole conceit work.