The extract starts with a medium shot of a woman in a
bathroom wearing a dressing gown alongside a very slow and quiet score. Already
the audience can guess that she is about to have a shower as her hair is dry
and by what she is wearing and where she is. The woman is quite young is
blonde, this is a stereotype of the usual female victims in films. She is also
on her own which outlines the fact that she is very vulnerable especially as
she is about to get into the shower. It then cuts from this shot to a high
angle close up of a toilet as the woman rips up and throws a piece of paper into
it whilst flushing it. Diegetic sound is used here to make the scene seem even
more normal and build suspense. This already brings an enigma to the extract as
the audience wonders what it was that she flushed down the toilet and why.
From here, it cuts to a shot of her closing the door to the
bathroom which shows that she is wary- although she knows that she is alone,
she feels the need to shut the door. This is also key to the scene later on. It
then cuts from here to a medium close up of the back of her head as we see her
take off her dressing gown. There is then a panning shot of her legs steeping
into the shower then shutting the shower curtains with diegetic sound of this
action which stands out so far in the extract. This makes the audience think
that the scene seems to normal as all it is, is of a woman showering with
nothing louder than shower curtains closing, this leads the audience to think
that something will happen soon and builds tension.
There is then a medium close up of her in the shower and we
see her move as the shower turns on as we see the water fall onto her with the
diegetic sound of it. It cuts from here to a worm’s eye view of the shower hose
then back to a medium close up of the woman. It then cuts to a medium close up
from the side of her which shows her on the right of the screen with the hose
and the water coming out of it on the left. There is then a close up of the
hose from the side of it followed by another medium close up of the woman but
this time from the opposite side where we see her on the left this time and the
hose on the right. Here the 180 degree rule is purposely broken to give an
effect of showing her from different angles creating more suspense as more
there is more normal time before the expected but unknown and mysterious event occurs.
The final normal shot of the woman in the shower is one of her on the right of
the screen with the water also coming from the right, leaving a big gap on the
left of the screen where there is nothing to see but the closed shower
curtains. However, we can just about see the door behind the curtain open and a
person walk through which becomes a lot clearer as there is an inwards zoom to
this part of the screen. This provides dramatic irony as us as the audience
knows that someone is there and something is about to happen but the woman is
unaware as she is in the shower.
The curtains are then rapidly opened by the murderer and pleonastic
sounds acts with this movement as a quick, high pitched score is introduced as
they are pulled to the side. This is what the whole scene has been building up
to from the tension and suspense created by different aspects of the
extract. It then cuts to a close up of
the woman’s face as she screams followed by various shots which shows her being
stabbed in a quick cut montage full of fast editing. Throughout this whole
montage, this high pitched, quick score is still playing to add to the shock of
it and to keep it going. All of the shots of this montage are all close ups,
medium close ups or extreme close ups so that the actual killing of the woman isn’t
shown so that it remains in the thriller genre and not made into a wet horror. We
then see the murderer leave the bathroom dressed in women’s clothing which once
again is dramatic irony as we as the audience know that the murderer is a woman
but no one inside the world of the film but the murderer themselves do. However,
later on in the film we learn that this is a Red Herring as we discover that
the murderer is actually a man dressed as a woman.
After the murderer leaves, the editing slows down and so
does the score which can be described as pleonastic as it mimics her death as
her life slowly comes to an end. There is a close up of her hand as it runs
down the wall followed by a medium close up of her completely falling down the
wall to her death. We can still see and here the water running which makes the
scene seem more realistic as we see her blood run down the plug whilst mixing
with the still running water. There is a graphic match shot with the plug and
the woman’s eye as she is dead on the floor which outlines her death being
drained away as the water does as well. From the shot of the eye, the camera
tilts and zooms out to reveal that the woman for definite is dead.
The scene ends with a tracking shot bringing us to a key
prop of a newspaper on a nightstand which is another mystery as the audience
wonders what is important about it. the extract ends with a point of view shot
which I believe is from the woman’s soul looking out the window with the asynchronous
sound of her son screaming as he finds her body.
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