‘No Good Deed’ is a 2014 film Directed by the Director I research, Sam Miller. As I aspire to make our film in a similar style that the director uses, I wanted to analyse more than just one piece of his work. Luther is his most famous but this is his newest.

The way he represents his characters in this film is very interesting and I looked closely in the ways he developed the characters to try and understand how he did so, to make our film work in the same way this does.

The first characters introduced are the Family of 4, the 2 Children and the mother and father who are clearly having marital problems, with the editing of the film making us empathise with the wife as it makes it look like the husband doesn’t care at all and the next shot cutting to close ups of the Wife’s face clearly upset by the lack of emotion that the husband shows. This immediately allows the audience to class her as the Damsel of the film. We then meet the other main character of the film, straight away we see him in handcuffs so we know he is someone who has broken the law in the past so the audience think could he possibly be the villain of the film. This is backed up by the sounds we hear as soon as his face is revealed, there is tense, scary non-diagetic music; making the audience know he is the villain. Although he denies everything, when we follow he journey to another prison he kills thee two police officers escorting him. His voice when he forces the police to lower their weapons is very creepy and his facial expressions stay the same even after he has shot them, proving he is out of control.

The Creepy music stops when we go back to the family, there is no music playing when the camera follows them through the house, when we see what the house looks like, I noticed that the house was especially very normal and it looks like a house that anybody could live in. Making it more real life for the audience to empathise. Later on in the film the two main characters meet when the Villain Colin knocks on the front door of Terri’s house while the husband is away, he then comes across as mysterious but nice person as he tries to persuade her to let him use the phone, it seems as if it was just the first house he came across. When she goes to get the phone so he can call the recovery truck, she looks in the mirror quickly and adjusts herself and her bra to make herself look a bit ‘sexier’. This is just signifying to the audience that she is unhappy in her marriage and is tempted to try and be seductive towards Colin. And once he gets invited in the editing and close-up camera work shows them clearly flirting with eachother, with her being completely unaware of what he is really like. With the audience knowing what he is really like, it draws them in to see what he is going to do to this woman. We haven’t seen how he reacts with innocent people in the past just police or people that he knows.

When his ex-girlfriend was introduced earlier on in the film, at first we had no idea who she was to him, thinking it was a stranger. Then it was revealed and he kills her for moving on while he was in prison, the audience is drawn in because they want to know if Terri is a complete stranger or whether she is in fact a part of his life, she has no idea who he is though; a complete stranger.

When she invites him in from the pouring rain she gives him some of her Husbands clothes to keep him warm while they wait for the recovery truck, they both go into rooms with mirrors in and it cuts between the two of them, and they both look at themselves and you can clearly see both of their true colours. Terri adjusting herself again, then realising she isn’t like that and she loves her husband, you can see that by the way she reacts; and Colin, looking in the mirror and you can see him touch his gun in the back of his trousers.

When she goes to call the recovery to see how long they are going to be she notices the phone doesn’t work and the phone line has been cut. Then she looks in the kitchen to get a knife for protection, and realises they are all gone as well, the audience know at this point that something is about to happen and they are drawn in to and engaged, this is what we want to do, add extra tension in places that already have a lot of tension within.

She then calls out for Colin because he wasn’t where she left him, and the music is building up to be faster and faster as she goes up the stairs. She slowly walks up to her baby’s bedroom and then the music cut out, to silence. Usually the audience would be scared, and expecting him to jump out on her or something, as they had done earlier in the film. But instead we hear him being playful in a muffled sound; he was in the other childs bedroom. And as Terri runs in, the editing is great when she sees his gun, then a close up of it, and then a reacting shot from her. This is the kind of subtle but obvious shot that we want to add into ours, and by reviewing this it helps us to go for the stle that we are aiming for. A slightly sinister tone.

This is just the first half of the film that gives us exactly the kind of style we will be going for, allowing us to create the tension, the real life storylines and use the generic conventions of social realism films but in a way that brings in this style of Sam Millers ‘No Good Deed’. There are aspects of this film that I portray as similar to our storyline and plot, and by interpreting this film it is helping us to develop our project in a very positive way.