Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Straw Dogs
1971 · Sam Peckinpah · Straw Dogs on Sightlines
4 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
Notice the low angles and through-glass shots of the farmhouse. (camera)
Coquillon frames Trencher's Farm from low angles and through windows, turning the house into something like a fishbowl David is watched and judged inside.
Payoff: The house is being staged as a place under observation from the very start.
Notice the damp, gray-green color of the Cornwall exteriors. (light)
John Coquillon photographs the countryside as unromantic: low cloud, stone, and mud that refuses any picturesque version of rural England.
Payoff: The landscape itself withholds the comfort a rural setting usually offers.
Look at the stone walls and low doorways of the farmhouse. (setting)
The house is thick-walled and cluttered, windows small, doorways low, so every room feels sealed off from the moors outside.
Payoff: The house reads as a shelter that is also a container.
Watch David's small evasions instead of his words. (performance)
Dustin Hoffman plays passive-aggression through nervous smiles and withheld confrontation, small physical retreats that build across the film rather than one dramatic choice.
Payoff: His discomfort is written in his body well before it's written in dialogue.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch David's glasses and what he does with them. Notice how he watches the people around him.