Opening scenes can shock, excite, confuse, foreshadow, introduce characters, establish world rules, and more. Beyond simply setting a tone, they start teaching the audience how to ‘read’ the movie — style, point of view, whether they lie or tell the truth (for example, if what a narrator says is at odds with images shown, the audience knows they are unreliable), are all crucial to forging the filter which colours how an audience processes and interprets the rest of the film.