Scene Breakdown

Twenty-some odd minutes into Bad Times at the El Royale directed Drew Goddard one of our main characters stumbled across a microphone bug in the telephone while phoning his daughter. Kickstarting the spiral that drives this movie forward. And I think the reactionary based editing of this scene helps get us there in a cohesive manner.

The scene begins from Sullivan’s back, slowly tracking in towards him unscrewing the base of the telephone. Just as he goes to pull the faceplate off the device it cuts to a high-angle over the shoulder shot, showing the guts of the telephone spill out. Then quickly cutting back to a close shot of his face as he begins talking. This pattern repeats as he starts to dig deeper into the wires, punching in extremely close to show the audience visual information. While at the same time telling more information with his phonecall. Sullivan’s facial expressions are focused on the phone call with his daughter when cutting back rather than his reactions to the device. These two shot positions serve as the base for this whole scene, keeping us grounded in continuity never feeling like we are ever lost as we cut between shots. With the phone and Sullivan in nearly the same location in the frame each cut, we aren’t ever tossed around clueless.

I think the highlight of this editing when Sullivan’s attention is pulled away from his daughter because of his change in expression. The camera slowly slides in and the music changes, without seeing “it” we know as an audience that he has discovered something with the phone. Even though it’s off-screen the past few cuts have given us a foundation on what we should be expecting.  A tonal shift occurs as the reaction shot is no longer based in dialogue but on what’s on-screen. The scene cuts in extremely close as he pulls the “bug” out from the mess, then cut further back to show the full motion of him yanking it out. This cut, I felt helped the viewer keep track of his movements or else we would be to close to visually understand. To end off the segment we cut to see his concerned face, an arm reached out in front of him with the wire in hand yet out of focus. The conversation with his daughter slowly lingering away as the subject matter has shifted.

I strongly feel the editing in this scene helps deliver a lot of information to the viewer because of the way the same reaction shot could be used for two different ideas. The same reaction shot in one moment is used to convey his emotional response to his daughter on the phone. The other nearly the same exact shot informs us that the telephone is bugged. While both simultaneously happening at once. I think this shows the power of editing.