a SWAT team deploys outside the house in which they think the serial killer is hiding. In a tense scene, they close in on the house and one of the cops rings the doorbell. The bad guy goes to the door and opens it… revealing Special Agent Clarice Starling, who has come to talk to him as part of her investigation, in another town and many miles away from where the SWAT team was moving in.
In The Fellowship of the Ring,
the hobbits are bedded down for the night in Bree. We see the Nazgul enter the inn and, as one, draw their longswords, ready to plunge them into the sleeping hobbits. When they hack the beds to pieces, however, we realize that the hobbits are abed elsewhere, not in the beds that the Ringwraiths attacked.
In each scene, the director has cleverly taken advantage of our assumption to where a key character(s) is. Is there a name for this kind of cinematic misdirection? Any other movies you can suggest that play similar tricks?
the hero is watching (IIRC) his kid on a live video feed only to find out later when he finds the location that it was a tape and the incident had happened hours ago
On second thought, it may not have been Saw, I’m really not sure what it was.
Another one, similar, but not quite the same since in this case, the misdirect isn’t against the audience, but directed at the antagonist and I’m not boxing it, because it’s not a spoiler. Speed. When they realize they’re being watched by the video camera they record a few minutes of themselves all trying to not move around too much, loop it and send that out as the live feed from the bus. Bad guy figures it out eventually, but it gives them some time without him watching them.
Jin was out buying flowers and stuff for his(with his wife) baby, only for us to learn he was actually in the past buying stuff for his boss’ kid, while only his wife was in the present.
The Usual Suspects misdirects you about the identity of Keyser Sose.
Gambit has a long sequence that’s all misdirection.
it shows a successful heist in the first half. In the middle of the film, you discover that it was all in Michael Caine’s imagination, and the you see the actual attempt, which doesn’t go quite so well
Virtually every episode of Jonathan Creek does this. Not only is it a mystery series, the protagonist works as a technical engineer for a magician, conceiving and building the equipment for his stage illusions. All of the cases are based on misdirection in one way or another. It’s often conveyed to the audience through intercutting shots of two difference sequences, and relying on the tendency of both the people in the story and the audience to assume that temporal interleaving means they’re linked.
Thanks, everyone. Obviously many movies, esp. thrillers and mysteries, rely on some kind of misdirection - I’m interested specifically in locational misdirection.
The climax of the remake of The Thomas Crowne Affair does this, not only with the location of the thief, but also with the location of the stolen painting.
Joker gives Batman a choice of rescuing either Rachel, his love interest, or Harvey Dent, the district attorney. Batman chooses Rachel and races to her, just in time to realize, along with the audience, that the Joker lied to him and sent him to Dent’s location. Rachel dies.