This shot is the visual equivalent of a slap in the face. Up until this point, everything has been drenched in darkness, grime, tight framing and uneasy compositions. Then suddenly we cut to this: the father’s face, dead center, lit by an overwhelming field of yellow that almost feels artificial. The symmetry itself becomes the shock.
He isn’t emoting. He isn’t doing anything dramatic. He simply looks forward with a cigarette hanging from his lips, and that lack of expression is what makes it interesting. You expect some kind of reaction, some kind of acknowledgement of the chaos he’s slowly sliding into, but he gives you nothing. He feels disconnected from his own world and from us as viewers.
The yellow background is intentionally aggressive. It’s too bright, too warm, too inviting for who he is and for what we’ve seen. It creates a kind of whiplash that makes you question where you are in the story, and whether this is even happening in the same reality as the previous shots. That dissonance is exactly what I wanted.
Placing him in the center, perfectly framed, softens the viewer for a moment. It gives a false sense of safety right before the story shifts gears into the first flashback. And even with the symmetry, the cigarette leaning slightly to the right breaks the stability just enough. It hints that something is off, even if we don’t understand what yet. This is the last moment where he is allowed to appear “normal.”
Symmetry as Psychological Disruption
When I started researching how symmetry affects viewer perception in horror, I realised it often creates unease rather than comfort. Perfect symmetry is unnatural. Human environments and human faces are rarely symmetrical, so when I placed the father dead center with a perfectly balanced frame, it wasn’t to soothe the viewer. It was to disturb them quietly. A centered composition strips away ambiguity. It forces the face into confrontation with the viewer and makes the stillness feel oppressive. That is exactly why I chose to break the chaos of the previous scenes with this rigid moment.
Artificial Warmth and Chromatic Whiplash
The overwhelming yellow came directly from research into colour dissonance. Warm colours in horror become threatening when they are used in abundance or without justification. When a colour that usually signals safety arrives too brightly and too suddenly, it becomes unsettling. I leaned into findings about how colour temperature influences emotional expectation. Yellow normally says warmth, life, comfort. But here it becomes a visual alarm. It shocks the viewer out of the grim palette they’ve adjusted to, and that abrupt shift destabilises the rhythm of the film in a way that primes them for the flashback.
Emotional Neutrality and Dissociative Stillness
Studying dissociation and detached behaviour helped shape the performance here. Characters who are emotionally shutting down often present blank, expressionless faces even in the middle of painful or chaotic circumstances. The absence of reaction reads louder than any exaggerated emotion. That informed the father’s look in this moment. No anger. No fear. No sadness. Nothing. Just an empty face and a cigarette. This lack of expression makes him feel disconnected from the world and from himself, and that hollowness feeds directly into the possession arc.
Cigarette as Micro-Asymmetry
In visual composition research, small asymmetries inside a symmetrical frame are used to create tension. The cigarette leaning slightly to one side became my version of that. Without it, the shot feels sterile. With it, the symmetry becomes brittle. The cigarette becomes the flaw in the pattern, the hairline crack before the break. It signals instability at a subconscious level and prepares the viewer for the emotional fracture that the flashback is about to introduce.
Transitional Shots as Structural Softeners
I looked into how filmmakers use “calm before the storm” shots to restructure pacing in horror sequences. Transition moments often create a false sense of softness before a major tonal shift. That is exactly what this shot does for the flashback that follows. The brightness and stillness serve as a threshold, a momentary reset before the narrative dives into a memory that recontextualises everything.
Controlled Disconnect Between Worlds
This shot comes right before the first flashback, and I reinforced that connection by making it feel like it doesn’t belong fully to the same world as the previous moments. In my research on surreal transitions, I saw how directors use visual disconnect to signal psychological drift. By pulling the father out of the grim, painterly darkness and dropping him into this hyper-bright void, I created a jump between realities. It pushes the viewer into questioning whether this is real, imagined, remembered, or something in between.