Three Film Openings

                     Three Film Openings

 

The Importance of Film -

Film openings are important to be able to build the tone of the story that the film will be about. The openings need to immediately engage the viewers and set the world's tone. It hooks into the theme and engages viewers to join forces in a grand entertainment experience for the key characters and themselves. Spreading the mood, genre, and overall piece helps control the expectations for the viewer more clearly. For our genre, Mystery, it creates suspense and a strong opening that resound and creates a sense of wanting to find out more about the plot since it creates "mystery" within the opening.

Films-

Glass Onion -A Knives Out (2022)-

 Knives Out is a mystery film that has a modern "whodunnit," directed by Rian Johnson, that goes from a suffrage aesthetic from gothic New England to a private island of a tech billionaire, Miles Bron, in Greece. The film functions as a sharp social irony of the "disruptor "class, in a group of high-profile friends that includes a politician, a scientist, and a fashion mogul, who were invited to the private island for a staged murder mystery game that turned lethal. The detective Benoit Blanc, played by Daniel Craig, remains the sole returning character.  A massive unit cast featuring Edward Norton, Janelle Monae, and Kate Hudson, the film's theme that is based on intellectual property, and the terms to which the elite will go to protect their fame. 

Knives Out starts with a split-screen creating the main suspects getting a massive wooden puzzle box. So, in the opening, a celebrity guest called Yo-Yo Ma, explains the musical concept of a melody that has been layered on top of itself until it gets to transform.  The film's narrative gets into loops, back to the beginning, to show the same events of the film from a different point of view. The opening lets me learn everything about the people in suspects before they even get to speak. One of the characters is a wild party, another is a politician in a frantic office, and another is a scientist. They have their methods of solving the box telegraph their roles in the coming murder. The character Andi simply smashes her box with a hammer.

 

Death on the Nile(2022)-

Death on the Nile is a mystery film that has served as a luxurious follow-up to the Murder on the Orient Express, centering on Agatha Christie's iconic Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. The opening is a traditional whodunnits, beginning with a black and white World War I introduction that acts as an "origin story" for the Poirot's nature and his famous mustache, showing that his facial hair was grown into a hide scar from the battlefields.  In the opening, it starts with Poirot's personal trauma and the loss of his love, Katherine, the film starts with a central theme of obsessive love in the mirrors that the suspects he will encounters on the S.S. Karnak in Egypt. 

Death of the Nile starts with a black-and-white sequence in the trenches of World War I. It provides a literal "origin story" for Poirot's famous hair. We see a young Poirot use his grey cells to foreshadow a gas attack. He succussed.  And by starting with the mud and blood of war, it signals that this isn't a "cozy" mystery. It shows that Poirot is not just a genius, a but a man who is defined by loss. It has sharply cut from the grey trenches and a vibrant, 1930s jazz club. It shows the same human violence Poirot has seen in the war.

A Haunting in Venice(2023) -

A Haunting in Venice is a mystery film that starts immediately with a shift from traditional mystery into a Gothic horror through the film's use of twisted cinematography and a somber, retired Hercule Poirot. The film showcases Poirot's self-imposed exile, the place where he lives a rigid, isolated life protected by a bodyguard. It is his own deep disappointment with the humanity following the war. The tone is shattered by the arrival of Ariadne Oliver, who has lured him to a crumbling, cursed palazzo on the All-Hallows' Eve to witness by a mysterious medium.

A Haunting in Venice starts with a radical shift in Poirot's character and with visual language. It shows Poirot in a sun-soaked but lonely Venice, eating in silence while his bodyguard keeps the people away. The film uses a lot of Dutch angles to create a sense of unease in the film. The mystery begins when the writer Ariadne Oliver arrives. She challenges him to solve a case she claims is truly unexplainable. The opening of the film effectively tricks the viewers into wondering if they keep watching a ghost story or a murder mystery; it is a tension that sustains the plot.

A Haunting in Venice(2023) - - Search Videos. (n.d.). Www.bing.com. Retrieved February 1, 2026, from https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=A+Haunting+in+Venice(2023)+-&&mid=93691483ED780AD8BB9A93691483ED780AD8BB9A&churl=https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2-BeLxzUBSs0uSrmzWhJuQ&FORM=VAMGZC

Death on the Nile opening film - Search Videos. (n.d.). Www.bing.com. Retrieved February 1, 2026, from https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=Death+on+the+Nile++opening+film&&mid=6311DCA038B713BADC996311DCA038B713BADC99&churl=https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-K8UrRQZuwohg2a_K7GFAw&FORM=VCGVRP

Pen English. (2022, December 23). Glass Onion - Solving The invitation part 1. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsM_prTGJjg

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