planning for critical questions: 1

These are just some incredibly quick, brief notes that i dictated into my phone while I had a friend asking me some question about my thriller. This was just a simple exersize i did to get an idea of how i would like to set out my Critical question one podcast. Critical question one How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues? plot summery hi as you heard before my name is Zoe Lennox and I am the director and producer of an upcoming thriller I’m just going to give you a brief synopsis of the plot just to get you up-to-date, it’s basically a film about a villain and a protagonist or antagonist and a protagonist and they are both very alike in the psychological journey that they go through in the film and it is hinted that they have a very similar background and that they were both perhaps abused during their childhood we are never given any details about this because I wanted to concentrate more on what was actually happening and I wanted the audience to move forward with the narrative rather than trying to play catch up on what has happened in the past anyways so the antagonist like I said before has some sort of mental disorder quite obsessive compulsive disorders and possibly multi personality and he has spent his life trying to control everything with the clocks in his house rules that are different times depending on what room you’re in he gets in his car and has to readjust his seat depending on the click of the chair that sort of thing and he has basically been so done wrong by a society play with the time isn’t that he has decided that he is absolutely not morally responsible for his actions and he goes round doing whatever he wants to do and that turns out being kidnapping people and keeping them in his house for weeks on end just to keep him company and sometimes his schizophrenia pushes someone else into the light he doesn’t remember that they’re there and he ends up killing a number of girls over a period of a few months and then the protagonist comes along and is fed up with society in the same way that the antagonist is except they are pitted against each other completely by chance even though they’re incredibly similar she is angry all the bad in society and so is he they are just expressing in a different way and as the narrative move along we believe that he is the one that’s the villain but she ends up exploiting his greatest weakness in the most ruthless Merciless way leaving The audience to believe that maybe she is actually the villain because she could see his illness his weakness his sadness and decides to use it against him so that’s basically the whole plot excluding the end but I don’t want to ruin that for any of you out there morning to go and see it on July 28 when it’s out on Netflix Conventions used male antagonist murder dark lighting, dusk realistic, everyday locations as opposed to hunted house or post apocalyptic world where a horror might be set i have used a female victim at the start which is pretty stereotypical, the damsel in distress Conventions I challenged The two main ways that I’ve challenged the stereotypes and conventions of The thriller genre within my film is number one the protagonist is female, this is no longer a very grounding breaking because if you think of thrillers like gone girl and black swan and bird box the protagonists are all very deep meaningful characters however if you look further into those representations The bottom line is the scent a character in gone girl is a wife and her actions are driven by a man and then you look at black swan and not that it’s a bad thing that her femininity is accentuated in a very classical traditional way it’s not breaking any boundaries in conventions of not only thrillers but the way it is to be represented in film, and then bird box as well it’s also the representation of a mother, absolutely not a bad thing it’s just a way that women have always been represented and presented in the media or in literature or in any form of text. The protagonist in my thriller does break these boundaries because she is not a girlfriend or wife she’s not seen as a daughter she’s not a mother figure she’s driven by her own will an anger. she does have a backstory and has the audience we never see you fully what that is and why she is in the situation she is of which she is an outlaw she’s going against the law and we get the impression that she’s been let down by law-enforcement and possibly a hint of abuse and sexual assault but there is no gender reveal We don’t know what happened to we don’t know who you are what did what they did to her. And this was very intentional I didn’t want it to seem like she was driven by a certain gender to become the way she is I just wanted her to be an individual is that the word I mean independent maybe, and her character is very similar To the villain so they both have the both mentally unstable and they both have what appears to be some sort of personality disorder and I wanted Them to walk along a very similar path psychologically because i’ve always found the villains point of view the most interesting and I wanted to keep them so similar because Hollywood movies always paint the hero to be some sort of amazing aspirational being and I think the villain can be just as amazing they’re just misunderstood the villain can be just a strong in interesting as the hero it’s just all about perspective and I believe that we as the audience have always been babied into a door in this conventional hero when a hero can be just like a villain if you look at it from a different

The next thing I have addressed is the theme of mental health is far the most prominent thing my address about how it can be so crippling and dramatically escalate to enormous scale where lives are at risk them but the main reason I did this was to leave the audience questioning the reliability of the narrators or the how trustworthy the storyline is and there’s a very key rash the opens with the antagonist talking to his therapist or we don’t actually know who it is it’s some sort of government hired person talking to the antagonist about what is happening but we don’t know if what he’s saying is real or if it’s just going on your head but just because it’s going on your head it doesn’t mean it’s not real am I right social groups This actually brings me onto a key social group that it this film is directed at and that’s the mental health of men particularly of ethnic minorities I determined that I wanted the antagonist to be an ethnically diverse male very early on in preproduction And I knew I wanted them to have some sort of deep rooted psychological and one for a better word disorder but the deepest social issue emerged later on when I was looking more at the protagonist backstory and how I wanted her to defeat the antagonist