Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch In Bruges
2008 · Martin McDonagh · In Bruges 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 how small the two men look in the squares. (camera)
Eigil Bryld shoots wide on anamorphic 35mm and sets Ray and Ken against centuries of stone. The Markt and the Belfry take most of the frame. The two of them keep getting swallowed.
Payoff: The city has not made room for them, and the compositions say so long before anyone complains about it.
Look at the Belfry tower and who wants to climb it. (staging)
The tower appears early and keeps returning. Ken wants to go up and see the view. Ray refuses. The film keeps measuring people by where they are standing on those stairs.
Payoff: The tower gives the film a vertical scale, so you can read who stands above and who below. In the reading: symbol. The reading calls the Belfry a symbol: one object that condenses the film's organizing idea into a shape you can see.
Listen to the bells and the echo in empty squares. (sound)
The town is out of season, so the ambience is church bells, footsteps and flat stone echo. Carter Burwell's score is piano and strings, elegiac and spare. The killings get no music at all.
Payoff: The silence around the violence makes it procedural rather than exciting, which is the film's position on the job.
Watch Farrell switch from joking to something else, fast. (performance)
Ray sulks like a teenager, insults the town, chases a girl, and then his face goes somewhere private. Farrell plays both without letting either one cancel the other out.
Payoff: The comedy and the grief are the same performance. You cannot take one of them and leave the other.
Notice the muted greens and grays against warm brick. (light)
The grade is autumnal and desaturated, relieved by gold lamplight and red-brick facades. Low season, low sun. The city is beautiful and the picture never quite lets it be cheerful.
Payoff: The beauty is real and unavailable to the man looking at it, which is exactly Ray's problem.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Two hitmen with nothing to do but look at a town. Watch what the looking does to them.