Here, the camera sits in the corner instead, watching from a distance. It still reads as a voyeuristic view, but now the tension comes from the asymmetry. We are not “invited” into the space. We’re pressed against the wall, observing something we should not be witnessing.
Because the room sits on a diagonal, everything naturally angles toward the woman anyway. The tables, the frames, the stacks of paints, even the posters on the wall – they all subtly point toward her. I pushed this further by rotating her chair and the painting behind her so that they face into the room rather than outward. The geometry of the space guides the eye, but without the theatrical feeling the earlier centered shots had.
The mother sits in front of a Burlap Friends painting and is actively working on it. She throws crumpled paper into a bin, adjusts her tools, and wipes her hands. It’s a snapshot of who she used to be before everything fell apart. The art supplies scattered around – the mannequin, the paint tins, the drying canvases – are arranged to sell the idea that this is her workspace, her domain. It’s lived in, cluttered, and grounded.
The ears posters are a direct reference to the earlier commercial on the TV. They create an immediate thematic bridge between the supernatural intrusion and the real world. The posters are positioned so that their faces angle into the room, which helped when the possession begins: the frame itself feels like it is leaning toward her before anything supernatural even happens.
The possession sequence begins when the face in the Burlap Friends poster starts to move. The mouth stretches unnaturally wide and the father’s head pushes through first. This is deliberate. The idea from the start was that the demon uses familiar faces to torment its victims. At the time I designed this sequence the child character didn’t exist yet, but the wide-open mouth left me enough room to insert the son’s head as the next layer of the intrusion. His head emerges after the father’s, and it feels like he is being vomited out by an icon of innocence.
The kid opens his mouth and begins speaking to her, and she immediately covers her ears. This ties directly into the structure I built earlier: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. This room is the “hear no evil” chapter. She tries to shut it out physically, but that gesture is pointless. The voices still break through.
When the transition triggers, the posters and frames close in on themselves and collapse visually, folding the scene down into darkness. From the bottom of that collapse emerges Lina. Time has passed since the previous shot. She is crouched on the floor, playing with the cat. The cat sits on top of a Burlap Friends toy and paws at her, acting like nothing is wrong. This is the only time she and the cat interact in a relaxed, almost domestic way.
She pulls her hands out toward the cat, almost like she is scolding it. Then she lifts the cat, gently moves it aside, picks up the toy, and walks off. That final gesture is important. It asserts her agency again.