Captivating Audiences

The opening scenes of a film are often the best. Even dire movies can start with promise, with an extended action sequence à la James Bond or a range of potentially interesting characters being introduced one by one. In a mystery or a thriller, you're enveloped in an intriguing situation that could lead anywhere.

Take an M Knight Shyamalan movie with an intriguing premise such as The Village, where a township in an earlier century is terrorised by monsters of the forest. But as the storyline settles into a recognisable pattern and then approaches a conclusion, the magic of the film often dissipates: a mystery is solved in a convoluted and contrived way; star-crossed lovers reunite, a western heads towards the inevitable showdown or the M Knight Shyamalan movie is explained by a monumental twist that was never hinted at in the previous two hours.

My idea is to prolong the start of the movie, and compress the rest. Leave a mystery unresolved and ambiguous; leave the lovers in a state of limbo, uncertain of their future together; keep introducing new characters till the very end; finish a war movie mid-battle. The audience will never see the end coming, so they'll be captivated all the way until the very last moment as the end titles roll without resolution to the story. They'll feel shortchanged and unsatisfied as they leave the cinema but thinking back rationally, they'll be pleased to have had an enjoyable few hours with their brain full occupied trying to see how the story will come together.