Enemy Trailer Analysis

By Leon J Connelly

The opening shot of Enemy is an extreme long shot of Toronto, filteredthrough a sepia dirty yellow filter. The shot is desolate an conveys with a simple establishing shot of the location of the film lots about the film withoutdialogue or music. The city is colourless, lifeless almost with an almost apoloypticbackground that seems to run forever. In my film during the opening shot of the trailer I want to establish the mood and feeling of movie, simply through the shot. The camera slowly zooms forward creating a sense of unease and suspicion. The modern City is a very common location for the mystery genre and as usual this opening shot conveysThe mystery genres obsession with darkness of modern life. In my film with the shots of theModern city in my film I want to create the same atmosphere of terror and fear.

The shot suddenly cuts to a close up of the main characters face. He seems almost shocked by the suddenness of the cut, as he turns towards the camera in the shot. He looks distressed unshaven, tired, immediately creating an impression of the main character in the audiences mind. He looks stern but we can’t yet decide whether this is from concentration or anger. In my film for the opening shot of the main character I also want to convey lots about the character simply from the way he looks but also create a sense of mystery of the protagonists motives.

This wide tracking shot of the main character walking through an urban apartment complex, from a behind perspective conveys a sense of unease as we the audience are stalk him around. This fits in with the themes of the film which involves one character following another around. This shot also brings to mind the Gus Van Sant “Death Trilogy” which throughout uses this type of tracking shot behind the characters to engross the audience in the characters mind-set. The main character is dressed in a common suit giving him a sense of anonymity and facelessness, forming an idea of him being an ordinary man, making us more distrustful when he begins to act in a way we wouldn't expect

The main character watches a DVD on a laptop and sees himself in the film. In this trailer this the key element that should make the audience want to see the film. The shot is an off-kilter, slandered close up of the characters laptop screen. The footage is grainy and poorly lit creating a sense of realism, engrossing us further in the story. When elements of surrealism are combined with realism, it creates hyperrealism, a technique which treats strange things in a realistic way. In my film I want to do something similar, in the trailer there will elements of surrealism but they will be treated as almost normal.

The music grows faster as we see the main character drastically walking through an urban complex, looking around suspicious and scared. The shot is a tracking shot, but it emulates footage shot on a camcorder as the camera shakes matching the fear and paranoia the characters feeling. This matched with the dirty yellow filter creates an unpleasant, almost sickening feeling in the audience. In my film there will be similar shots of the main character frantically moving, looking suspicious. These shots without revealing to much about the plot tell us a lot about the character and the film without giving away crucial plot details. They also give the trailer a sense of motion.

A great wide low angle shot of huge looming metallic buildings with power lines running in front of the dividing the frame. This shot strikingly demonstrates the main characters dread and anxiety as everything, even his own city begins to look threating to him and by extension us the audience. This is a common theme in the mystery genre as it attempts to make us look at thing we hold normal, even things that don’t seem to have any impact on our own lives like the way the places we live look, and treats them with a level of contempt and mistrust in order so that the audience can rexamine there own lives and the things that they take as being normal and correct. In my film I wish to create a similar effect to this.

The main character’s partner here is framed in shoulder high medium shot against a miserable wallpaper looking coldly at the main character as he emotes greatly to her his feelings of obsession that he has begun to have. This here pears into the most essential element of mystery films, the peering behind the curtain at relationships, whether they be of a romantic or non-romantic to see what’s really going on behind the surface. Her cold stare begets a sense of confusion and rejection people worry might befall them if they express a sense of anxiety towards commonly held principles of society. Through mystery films we voylusirically can see what happens when these principles are broken. The woman in this film is an attractive blond woman, a common architype associated with weak ineffectual, emotionally distraught people, but here her cold emotionless creates a sense of disease.

The main character appears now in a darkly lit hotel room in a tracking behind medium shot. The lighting matched with the characters jittery nervous movements, the blandness of the room as well as the building tension created by the escalating score of the music finally being dropped, produce in the audience a sense of anticipation and trepidation with wants going to happen next. This is the key aspect in mystery trailers, they need too in 2-3 minutes create a mystery in the mind of the audience that with stick with them and make them have to see the film to find what the revelation of the mystery is. With my film I feel that it is essential to the film that the trailer creates this mystery.

Suddenly out of nowhere the audience is given a sematic code, all the thoughts and wonderings about what’s happening in this film that the audience gets from the trailer