21 Jul The Residence (2025)

Layers

My history of film centres on an understanding of noir and how it has become a game between filmmaker and viewer. Central to that is the detective story.

The pinnacle of that genre is Agatha Christie but no film has translated well until now. I haven’t had as much sheer fun watching a movie as I have had in these eight hours.

Essentials include: a sequestered house so you know the killer is among the group. You need a quirky detective, ideally one who compares the suspects to some unrelated experience. Many of the suspects are hiding the truth and all the major ones will have motive and opportunity. All these quirks have to live in the same fabricated world, ideally class centric

In many instances, the sheer limitation of the murder space constrains what can happen.

And then if this is a film you have to visually supplement the headshots (where suspects inform and misdirect) with repeated playbacks and spatial establishment. This is done here with very clever use of a three dimensional model and use of camera angles that relate many scenes to the model. Just genius on all these accounts.

Elaborations include her drawings in her (birding) notebook and the photos of each suspect.

But the truly brilliant innovation is the introduction of what I call an additional fold. The suspects watch. The detective watches (together with an on-screen audience). We watch. Usually, the play of folds is among these. Here we have a Senate Hearing, an additional on-screen audience that hears testimony about what the detective is doing incrementally — without the detective until the last reveal. This extra layer is inserted brilliantly, and moves the genre way past the ‘Knives Out’ model.

Posted in 2025

Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.

IMDB