Prisoners – film analysis

As the clip starts we see a Medium-Long Shot of the location which is a diner, we also see a person’s car and the fact that it’s raining. The persons car is Low-Key lit whilst the inside of the diner is High-Key lit, showing this lighting contrast between the two areas makes me feel that inside the diner is a safer place than outside due to the dark and how one of the main conventions in horror is a dark Low-Key lit setting.
Furthermore, the rain in the sequence is a form of pathetic fallacy, as it’s used to foreshadow a bad event in both literature and film, but as the sequence progresses and reaches a climatic ending, so does the rain. We see it get worse as the sequence continues possibly foreshadowing a death or something we don’t know of yet.
From what we can hear there is no Non-Diegetic sound throughout the clip all the sound is Diegetic but no music, this makes me feel uncertain of what is about to happen and constantly on edge, this is a trick that most horror directors use to try and scare audiences as they are made to feel uneasy and uncertain by the lack of sound.
We then get a cut to inside the diner, as we see a man on his own at a table eating, the camera is at a Medium-Long Shot of his back so we don’t know who he is, and this gives the man a sense of mystery about him as he is also sitting alone, it gives us an idea on what type of a person he is. However, we do know that he is a person of importance as the camera tracks forward onto him and he is the only person in the diner.
The scene then cuts to an eye level view of the man eating, the camera is focused on the shallow depth of field putting focus onto him confirming that he is of importance, we don’t see the person he is talking to properly in this moment but we still hear her talk putting focus onto him and what they are saying. They are talking about animals and what they were born as in the Chinese year, I have a feeling that this is another foreshadowing as it seems out of place with the scene, but I haven’t seen the film so I don’t know.
The scene cuts to a long shot of inside the diner, letting us see outside to see that the rain has gotten worse, and that it is still dark, showing that the diner is still a ‘’safe place’’ . Cutting again to outside the diner we see the man get into the car that we saw at the beginning of the clip, we get a close-up again in the shallow depth of field but this time it’s to see his reaction to the call he just received about an RV that has been spotted, giving us a bit of exposition on what is about to happen next.
Another technique that is used at this moment is a form of Chiaroscuro lighting where we have his face split by the High-Key lighting of the diner and the Low-Key lighting of the car suggesting he is entering a bad situation by leaving the diner.
Whilst the background is blurred but just enough so that we can still see the raindrops on the car, we get an extreme close up of his silhouetted face, because its silhouetted we know that he is going to a bad scenario as he is completely shadowed instead of partly.

The scene cuts from the view of the diner from inside the car to a view of a wooded area which we can guess is a view from inside the RV as it’s some different persons face that we can see silhouetted in the same style as the other guy’s.
the next interesting thing is how when the car enters the camera is stationary panning slightly left as the car comes towards the camera, this makes me feel as if I was already there, as he gets out the car get jump cuts as it cuts to either a long shot of the scene or him walking, when he walks the camera tracks back again making me feel as if I was there.
we then get a parallel cut from inside the RV, we know that’s its parallel because a reflection of the man walking towards the RV is shown, however the reflection is at an angle or a Dutch tilt, showing the person looking into the mirror is not mentally stable meaning he could be on drugs or criminally insane.
the next parallel cut if from three different places in that scene showing what’s going on from three different vantage points, as the RV crashes we get jump cuts of the RV crashing to give us a perspective of what we think we saw when we probably didn’t see him crash the car specifically it just looked like it, this is used a lot in the Hollywood film industry.

I haven’t seen this film of yet but from the lack of Non-Diegetic sound and the cuts with also the pathetic fallacy off the rain, I can make an informed guess of what’s going on and that I think this scene is towards the end of the film as it seems to reach a climactic point when the arrest the guy in the RV, we also know what’s going on because of the exposition given by the radio and also at the start with the traits of animals, so perhaps when they try and interrogate the man he will be like the rooster that is the woman boss.