Analysing Thriller/Mystery Opening Sequences - 'The Girl On The Train'

'The Girl On The Train'

• There is a voiceover of the main character talking which gives us as the viewer an idea of her obsessive personality. She sounds sad. Voiceovers are quite common in the thriller genre
• She is watching out of the train giving all the people she sees their own backstory and creating her own kind of fantasy story for them, suggesting loneliness and a tendency to make things up
• As she watches the people it switches back forth between point-of-view shots and her face where she is looking, giving us the idea that she is watching people
• We also can see other people staring at her too
• There is mysterious non-diegetic music playing throughout the opening scene
• The camera does lots of slow zooms, slow pans and the camera movement overall which builds up tension
• There are lots of shots of her face and facial expressions giving the impression that something bad has happened to her.
• The lighting is low-key and some scenes are shot at night, giving us a variation between what happens in the morning contrasting to the night
• The tight framing around her implies that she might be trapped and many other things that she looks at has looser framing.
• They show a birds-eye-view shot to maybe establish setting and they are also used in thrillers to suggest that the character is out of their own control of what is happening to them and might be manipulated
• She fidgets her hands in a nervous and anxious manner, suggesting that she may be unstable
• The side lighting suggests that she has two sides of her personality as one half of her face is lighter and the other half is darker. It makes the viewer feel like they can't read her as a person and the audience is unsure to whether she is a good or bad person/whether she can be trusted (an important plot in many thrillers)
• We see a flashback or memory showing that something has changed and she was much different in the past. It sets up mystery as it makes us wonder what happened to make her change to drastically
• The use of the prop of alcohol shows that she is having a tough time and needs something to help her get through it