Don't Make It Obvious (til hindsight): MISFITS and Visual Foreshadowing

How To Make a Death Feel Surprising, Yet Inevitable

Let’s look at how this tense scene from Misfits 1.05 "Episode Five" subtly sets up a crucial element of its climax — without cutaways, crashzooms, rack focuses, or anything else which could feel obtrusive.

video contains spoilers for Misfits S1
CW: blood, violence

The ‘chase sequence’ in this area of the school begins with Sally rattling one locked door, then running to another; both of which she grabs by the handle.

In the middle of the scene, while she desperately looks for another way out, the doors are shown essentially from her vantage point; medium shots, moving camera, nothing out of the ordinary.

Then Simon appears — with their confrontation the scene moves mostly into closeups. It uses closeups both because they are more intimate, and because Sally’s terror is narrowing her attention to things like the blood on Simon’s head and the mop handle weapon he’s holding.

To transition into the next section of the scene, a POV of Sally’s phone moves our — and Simon’s — focus, and triggers the next phase as they fight to gain the phone.

The fight is mostly kinetic closeups, with occasional mediums as bodies go flying, or to show the phone in context of its proximity or distance to Sally and Simon.

In one of those kinetic medium shots, Simon throws Sally against the door.

Things go still, then we see his wide-eyed face in a closeup before cutting to what he’s looking at: a bloodied door handle and Sally’s face; the handle in focus so we cannot avoid staring at what Simon sees.

While the suddenness of Sally’s death may be shocking, and Simon’s reaction shows he didn’t mean to kill her — at least, not here, like this — the possibility has loomed over the scene since it started.

The door handles have been there, both interacted with and in frame, the whole time.

Takeaways

In retrospect, we were shown the thing which would kill Sally from the very first time she tried to escape, rattling the handles.

A crash-zoom into them, or a cutaway of the handle, would have telegraphed this ending too much. If Sally had instead been impaled on a stairway railing we hadn’t see, or Simon would have swung a fire extinguisher which hadn’t been established, her death may have felt too sudden and deus ex machina.

Instead, the way this scene is shot allows for shock in the moment and then inevitable in the immediate aftermath, all while never feeling like a ‘cheat.’