Thunderbolts* · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A figure standing in a wide dark frame, lit from one side, never quite resolved out of the black. That composition keeps returning in Thunderbolts\, and it's worth holding onto, because it tells you what kind of film you're in before the plot does. Marvel hired Andrew Droz Palermo, who shot A Ghost Story and The Green Knight*, and he brought the habit of letting a single source do the lighting and letting everything else go. Bodies dissolve into shadow instead of being rescued by fill light. In a franchise whose house style is total legibility, that's a small act of sabotage, and the first sign that the movie plans to withhold something.

What it withholds is the fight.

Superhero cinema is the last great industrial home of what Gilles Deleuze called the movement-image. The logic is old and simple: a character perceives a situation, acts on it, and the action changes the situation. Threat, blow, restoration. The whole grammar serves that chain, which is why the cutting accelerates as the punch gets closer. Deleuze argued the circuit broke after the Second World War, in the rubble of Italian neorealism, where people began to see more than they could do anything about. He called it the crisis of the action-image: the situation arrives and the adequate response doesn't.

Thunderbolts\* stages that crisis inside the one form built to resist it. The Void, the annihilating half of Bob Reynolds whose other half is the godlike Sentry, is not a villain who happens to be too strong. It's a thing to which hitting does not apply. The screenplay refuses the genre's standing solution: the climax is won by joining Bob inside his worst memory and refusing to leave him alone in it. Deleuze's interest wouldn't be that this is kind. It's that the link between perceiving and acting has been cut, and once it's cut the image has to find something else to do.

You could skip all of this and say it's a superhero movie about depression. True, but that description explains none of the craft. The Deleuzian frame earns its keep by predicting the choices: why the faces, why the held frames, why the cut stops counting down, why the score has no brass in it.

Start with the faces. Deleuze's affection-image is a feeling that registers on a face without discharging into action — normally one beat before someone swings. Florence Pugh holds that beat for a whole film. The picture is built around her ability to make numbness watchable, and numbness is a formal problem, not just a mood: it is affect with nowhere to go. The action photography follows suit, favoring coverage that keeps performers' faces available over kinetic abstraction. Angus Wall and Harry Yoon cut for ensemble comic timing and then let scenes breathe well past the franchise norm. Deleuze had a name for a character who has stopped being an agent and become a watcher and endurer: the seer, le voyant. Yelena is one for most of the runtime. By the end everyone in the room has joined her.

Then the sound. Inside the Void you can only look and listen, which is Deleuze's pure optical and sound situation exactly: no available action, so perception detaches and floats free. Son Lux, arriving from Everything Everywhere All at Once, score it with processed acoustic textures and post-rock swells rather than heroic brass, and the sound design uses enveloping low end and dropouts to make depression a condition of the audio itself. A dropout isn't a sound effect. It's a small refusal of the movement-image, because nothing can be cued if nothing is going to happen.

Then the space. Deleuze's any-space-whatever is a space that has stopped serving as a setting for action and become a carrier of pure feeling: deserted, fragmented, hard to map. The Void interiors are built from shame and recollection, staged theatrically and abstractly, and they connect by affect rather than geography. The film earns this by contrast. Its ordinary world is deliberately shabby — an underground vault, plain apartments, the decaying domesticity Alexei and Yelena share. Downscale the real so that the mind registers as a departure.

Then time, where the film is most quietly ambitious. Cross-cutting between memory and present is standard blockbuster hardware, usually a countdown device. Here it builds the emotional argument instead. And what the characters enter is not a dated flashback, the sort of filed and retrieved image Deleuze called a recollection-image. It's a region. He called these sheets of past: layers of time you move through rather than replay, an order you can get lost inside. The Void is a labyrinth of Bob's memories, and travelling it is the plot. Notice too that Bob himself barely acts. He goes still and the world moves, the shadow expanding across Manhattan. Deleuze saw that when a character stops moving, movement can migrate into the world. Depression, staged as weather.

Palermo's darkness gets its own claim. Deleuze's account of German expressionism turns on the light-and-shadow gradient, in which things that aren't alive take on a life of their own, non-organic and hungry. Living shadow that swallows a city is that idea seventy years later, and the technique reaching it comes straight from The Green Knight: single-source murk, silhouette instead of resolution.

The lineage is unusually legible. Guardians of the Galaxy supplied the template of damaged misfits becoming a chosen family, comedy as the binding agent. The Suicide Squad supplied the structure of expendable low-tier antiheroes assembled under coercion. But the decisive debts sit outside the genre. A Ghost Story taught Palermo the patient held frame. Everything Everywhere All at Once proved Son Lux could treat effects as externalized emotional architecture, which is precisely what the Void is. Beef is the real parent: Schreier's willingness to sit inside self-loathing, plus Joanna Calo's prestige-comedy interiority, transplanted whole into a tentpole. Marvel didn't hire an indie director. It hired an entire A24-adjacent nervous system and let it run the operating logic.

What follows is a question more than a claim. The film proves a blockbuster can end in an interior, with a resolution force cannot produce, and still work as popular entertainment. Whether an industry whose economics depend on escalation can keep that switch off is genuinely open, and the movie's own asterisk is a sly, uneasy answer: the team is rebranded in-narrative as the New Avengers. Deleuze used fabulation for people caught in the act of legending themselves into being, usually a minor people inventing a future. Here the legend arrives from outside, as branding. A group of castoffs spends a movie learning that being witnessed is labor, and the reward is a franchise name.

Watch it again for the shots where someone stands alone in the dark and nobody comes to fill the light. That's the film thinking.