Countdown to the Oscars: Best Cinematography

Director of photography Roger Deakins earned his 13th nomination for Best Cinematography for Sicario.

Welcome to Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars, our daily look at this year’s Academy Awards race. Be sure to check back every day this month for analysis of each of the Academy’s 24 categories.

Best Cinematography

The nominees are:

Carol

The Hateful Eight

Max Max: Fury Road

The Revenant

Sicario

As I said last year, this is my favorite category, and everything I said then holds true now. I would also add cinematography might be the most democratic craft where general audiences are concerned. The average movie-goer does not necessarily know what makes for a good sound mix or whether something is well edited, but anybody can look at an image onscreen and understand its beauty. Photography is visceral. We respond to it because we feel it instinctively.

That said, it is among the most technically challenging aspects of filmmaking. Composition, depth of field, color, the interplay between light and shadow – these are intellectual, artistic pursuits. Only the masters can make it seem as easy as pointing a camera and rolling film. The audience feels the image because of the care and effort that went into creating it. Few use greater care or put forth more effort than these five nominees.

The Revenant – The images Emmanuel Lubezki captures boggle the mind. The ways his camera moves through space, frames action, and observes stillness are on a level we have never seen. I would call him the best cinematographer alive today if not for the fact I think he has a legitimate claim as the best of all time. A quick greatest hits from the man they call Chivo: Sleepy Hollow, The New World, Children of Men, The Tree of Life, Gravity, Birdman, and now The Revenant. Every frame from every one of those films could hang in a museum.

Perhaps it sounds like I am overstating his brilliance, but I promise the modern history of cinema will not be written without mentioning Lubezki. His work has always been otherworldly, but his two collaborations with director Alejandro González Iñárritu, Birdman and The Revenant, have changed the way we think about the art form. The Revenant is composed of a series of gorgeous gray and white tableaux that evoke the primal forces of nature in their grandeur and objectivity. Lubezki has no rival, and The Revenant has no equal this year in cinematography.

Lubezki has been nominated nine times and won twice – of course, he should have won at least twice more. His two wins have come in the last two years for Gravity and Birdman, making him only the fourth person in history to win consecutive cinematography Oscars. No one has done it three times, but this work and this artist might just break that streak. The only person standing in the way is the next nominee on our list.

Mad Max: Fury Road – John Seale retired a few years ago with a résumé that included four Oscar nominations and one win for The English Patient, as well as countless other popular and critical hits. His legacy was secure, and he could have left it at that. Instead, he let George Miller talk him back to work for the gonzo action epic Mad Max: Fury Road. Thank god he did because the 73-year-old director of photography brings to the film the energy and nihilism of someone 50 years younger but the skill of a craftsman who has been in this game forever.

When you watch Mad Max: Fury Road, the first thing you notice is the color. The hyper-saturated vistas of Miller’s post-apocalyptic wasteland are absolutely striking. Never has a desert been so orange, and at night, you never saw the earth so blue. It is audacious and bold and innovative in ways lesser filmmakers would shy away from, but Miller provides the canvas, and Seale paints the picture. Whether Seale will win the Oscar this year is an open question, but our victory as an audience is simply that he came back for one last ride – and on a war rig, no less.

Carol – Ed Lachman may not be the star the rest of the nominees in this category are this year, but his chameleon-like adaptability behind the camera has made him the perfect fit for genre-hopping director Todd Haynes. Every time they come back together, Lachman seems inspired to push his work in new, exciting directions. Beginning with the Sirkian melodrama Far From Heaven and onto the Bob Dylan biopic as experimental art film I’m Not There and cable miniseries Mildred Pierce, Lachman always seems to find new notes to play for Haynes.

So it is with their latest collaboration, Carol, a 1950s-set romance that is thematically similar to their previous work but as stylistically different as can be. Since the story is set primarily in New York City, Lachman has license to go darker and dirtier than one typically would expect for the era being depicted. This world feels lived in, and Lachman constantly obscures the frame with rain or curtains or windows or all three to suggest the hidden lives of the characters, the lives nobody sees or wants to see.

Sicario – Twelve previous nominations for Roger Deakins and no wins. This is his 13th nod, and he will not win this one either, putting him in a tie with the late George Folsey for Oscar futility in this category. To nominate him that many times, his fellow cinematographers must respect him beyond belief, and that respect is due, but the Academy as a whole simply has never been willing to go there. For actors and directors who get repeated nominations without winning, there is often a groundswell of support as members rally behind the artist and finally award him or her. That does not seem to be true for craftspeople such as Deakins.

The work itself this year, well, of course it is awesome. This is the fourth consecutive year Deakins has received a nomination, and Sicario is the best work he has done of the bunch. The night-vision sequence alone is enough to leave even accomplished filmmakers scratching their heads and wondering how it was done. Deakins uses shadows and silhouette the way musicians use silence, finding meaning in the emptiness. It is truly fine work and Deakins’ best probably since the one-two punch of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and No Country for Old Men in 2007, but it still is only the third- or fourth-best nominated work this year.

The Hateful Eight – Like Lubezki and Deakins, Robert Richardson is a giant of cinematography. His work with Oliver Stone (10 films, three nominations, one Oscar) and Martin Scorsese (four films, two nominations, two Oscars) would be enough to secure his place in the canon. Yet, his collaborations with Quentin Tarantino are likely the films for which he will be most remembered – five films, three nominations, no Oscar yet.

Richardson has proved to be the ideal director of photography to capture Tarantino’s twin loves of American westerns and martial arts films. If you ask me, Kill Bill Vols. 1 and 2 constitute a crowning achievement in paying homage to a genre while establishing a unique voice outside the genre’s confines. Go figure, those are the only two films together for which Richardson was not nominated.

The Hateful Eight is a grand experiment in bringing a long-dormant film process back to life, glorious Ultra Panavision 70, as it was billed. It lives up to that billing in the movie’s opening sequences, set amid a blizzard in the mountains of Wyoming. However, when the film moves indoors for the last two hours and 20 minutes or so of its three-hour runtime, the wider frame loses some of its punch. The nomination is a nice bit of recognition from fellow cinematographers, but I doubt if the work will do much for the rest of the Academy when put up against this list of nominees.

The final analysis

Mad Max: Fury Road or The Revenant, flip a coin. The Academy likes its winners to be pretty, innovative, or both. That sounds more like The Revenant, but I have this nagging feeling that voters will be reluctant to award Lubezki for a third straight year. The work certainly deserves it, but with a viable alternative and a great story in Seale, it is just as possible members go that direction.

Carol and Lachman would be the likely beneficiary of a split vote between the top two films, and Lachman received the lion’s share of critical plaudits this season, though most of those awards came before The Revenant had screened. In the end, I am predicting Lubezki will pick up his third in a row because it is the film more Academy members are likely to have watched, and to watch it is to be in awe of it.

Will win: The Revenant

Should win: The Revenant

Should be here: The Tribe

Tomorrow: Best Editing

New movie review: The Revenant

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Hugh Glass in the western survival saga The Revenant. 

It is rare that I am left speechless after a film. I might not have a lot to say about a bad movie, or I might need time to gather my thoughts after a great one, but I pretty much always have something to say. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant, however, left me absolutely without words. It is a densely packed, gorgeously realized, elliptically told story of survival and vengeance in the Old American West, but every time I sit to ponder it – as I have done almost without end now in the day and a half since seeing it – new elements cry out for consideration.

The certainties are these: Iñárritu, who won three Academy Awards last year for writing, directing, and producing Birdman, has made another impossibly grand work of art; Leonardo DiCaprio, already one of the finest actors of his generation, has delivered a career-topping performance; director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki, who has won the last two Oscars for cinematography, has somehow found new ways to expand the visual language of film; and never has there been told on screen a more harrowing or epic tale of revenge than that of Hugh Glass.

Glass is a frontiersman hired by Capt. Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) to guide his fur-trapping expedition up the Missouri River. They start off with a crew dozens strong, but after repeated attacks by the native Arikara tribe, they are down to just 10 men. Among them are Glass’ son, Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), and Jim Bridger (Will Poulter). To avoid the Arikara, who know the river well, they set out on an overland route hundreds of miles to a U.S. Army fort where they can find relief.

Along the way, while out alone and hunting for game, Glass stumbles upon a mother grizzly bear and her two cubs. Glass is mauled in one of the most vicious and brutal attacks I have ever seen. The bear methodically tears away at Glass’ legs, chest, hands, back, neck, and face, and in a final insult, even when Glass manages to kill the bear, it falls dead on top of him, pinning him to the ground. When his traveling companions find him, he is gushing blood from just about every part of his body and his legs are broken. They reasonably conclude he will die, but as long as he is breathing, they vow to carry him.

As the terrain grows increasingly unnavigable, Glass’ broken body becomes more of a burden. Fitzgerald and Bridger, along with Hawk, agree to stay behind, wait for him to die, and give him a proper burial. Fitzgerald’s impatience, however, leads him to kill Hawk, lie to Bridger about an impending Arikara attack, and attempt to bury Glass alive. He succeeds in all these goals, but alas, Glass has no plans to die and sets out on shattered bones and festering wounds across 200 miles of frozen earth to seek his revenge.

The film is based on the Michael Punke novel of the same name, which itself is based on a heavily fictionalized account of the real Glass’ life. Iñárritu and co-writer Mark Smith’s screenplay sticks fairly close to the source material, which is a smart move given the unreliable nature of tales from the Old West. Glass is the kind of historical figure people tell tall tales about, a Paul Bunyan type who certainly existed but may not have been as great as the stories. By freeing themselves from the burden of history, Iñárritu and Smith are able to focus on the universal traits of human nature they are keen to explore.

Glass goes through more pain and suffering – both physical and emotional – in his journey than any of us is likely to experience in a lifetime. In this way, The Revenant is a dark testament to the spirit of man, but at the same time, it is a reminder of the indomitability of nature. Every character in this film is at the mercy of the natural world – the frigid temperatures, the rushing rivers, the jagged rocks, the animal kingdom, etc. For as invested as we become in the human concerns and trials of Glass, Iñárritu and editor Stephen Mirrione are quick always to remind us of the natural surroundings, ever-present and eternal.

Emmanuel Lubezki's gorgeous photography in The Revenant.

At more than two-and-a-half hours, The Revenant is long, but it earns every second of that runtime by offering the audience the chance to bask in its stillness, its quiet, and its beauty. In one of the most gorgeous shots of the year, we witness DiCaprio trudging through the snow toward his destination, and the camera pulls back to reveal a sea of pristine white ground. He is moving, but he is not going anywhere. His purpose is clear to him, but against this backdrop, it seems much smaller. He seems much smaller.

Iñárritu and Lubezki’s compositions make this point again and again in wide shots that establish the vastness of the world and in close-ups that demonstrate the havoc that world wreaks on the characters’ faces and bodies, not to mention their spirits. Lubezki has a facility for capturing thematic resonance with stirring imagery. His camera movements as ever are swift, fluid, and never without purpose, but here he finds magic even when he lets the camera linger on the embers of a fire floating up to the heavens, the leaves of trees rustling, or a boat floating along a foggy river. In a word, it is mesmerizing.

On the whole, Iñárritu and his collaborators have created the ultimate sensory experience – from Lubezki’s awe-inspiring photography to Jack Fisk’s world-building production design to the sound department’s remarkable sonic landscape. Every piece of the puzzle reveals something special, unique, and wondrous about what The Revenant ultimately is, and perhaps the most important piece to fall into place is the acting.

The idea that DiCaprio is chasing an Academy Award has taken on a life of its own, and it seems true that if he cannot win an Oscar for this performance this year, then he may never win one. However, DiCaprio is a multi-millionaire philanthropist and world-famous, widely respected actor with a dream life most of us could not imagine. A little gold statue is not going to change any of that. This makes it all the more impressive then that he seems hell bent on stretching the boundaries of his considerable gifts and plumbing the depths of every character that comes his way.

Tom Hardy in The Revenant.

He embodies Glass in all the ways it is possible to become another person. Movie stars often have trouble disappearing into roles, leaving audiences impressed but not moved. DiCaprio has even used this quality to his advantage in a number of parts. In The Revenant, however, there is not one moment where we are seeing anything but Glass, and as DiCaprio transforms, we are transported into his world. Even apart from the technical skill and dedication of learning two native languages and eating raw bison liver, DiCaprio delivers a performance of raw spiritual intensity that belongs to the ages.

Off in the other half of the story, Hardy, Poulter, and Gleeson bring the same level of energy and emotional acuity to their smaller, supporting roles. Hardy is particularly good as Fitzgerald, the antagonist who sets most of this bloody saga in motion. Fitzgerald is a grizzled man of the mountains as much as Glass, but he is blinded by greed and an overwhelming instinct for self-preservation. Hardy expertly brings this out in his mannerisms, his inflections, and his general sense of being.

The Revenant is an all-encompassing feat of filmmaking. It is about resiliency and frailty, vengeance and forgiveness, death and resurrection. It is meditative but propulsive, grisly but gorgeous, audacious but restrained. From Iñárritu to DiCaprio to Lubezki to Fisk to Mirrione to Hardy and everyone else on this production, the film is evidence of a group of talented individuals creating art at the absolute heights of their powers. At this point, I have spent more than 1,300 words describing this film, and I have only scratched the surface of its impact – because sometimes, there are no words.

See it? Yes.

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Cinematography

Timothy Spall stars as JMW turner in the gorgeous Best Cinematography nominee Mr. Turner.

Each day as we make our way to the Academy Awards ceremony Feb. 22, Last Cinema Standing will take an in-depth look at each of the categories, sorting out the highs, the lows, and everything in between. Check back right here for analysis, predictions, and gripes as we inch toward the Dolby Theater and that world-famous red carpet.

Best Cinematography

The nominees are:

Birdman

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Ida

Mr. Turner

Unbroken

This is my favorite category. What distinguishes film as a storytelling medium from others such as radio or literature or even television in many cases is its ability to tell stories visually. We take it for granted. With Facebook and Instagram, we are all essentially telling our life stories through images, but if you stop for a second and really think about it, it should become clear what a revolutionary idea that is.

Nothing connects the world like moving images. We cannot all read the same books or listen to the same speeches, but we all understand that shadows are scary, chases are thrilling, and pratfalls are funny. All it takes is the right image, and a filmmaker can speak to the whole world. The cinematographers are the artists who craft those images, and the best of their work serves as a masterclass in why films are important.

This year’s nominees run the gamut from war stories to chamber dramas, color to black and white, and statue still to ever-moving. What they share, however, is impeccable craftsmanship and a dedication to visual storytelling. Only one nominee this year is a previous winner, and he is the most likely and deserving winner as well, so that is where we will begin our analysis.

Birdman – There is not another film this year that blends the innovation and integration of director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki’s work on this picture. A lot has been written about the work, and I have written about it a number of times, but to see it is to know you are witnessing greatness. The basic trick of the film is that it looks like one unbroken take. The camera darts and dives, swoops and spins, but never looks away. Save for couple moments at the beginning and end, the film’s few edits are hidden within the structure of the camerawork.

The style is the logical result of the direction Lubezki has been heading his entire career, particularly in his collaborations with director Alfonso Cuarón, who is good friends with Birdman director Alejandro González Iñárritu. Cuarón has always favored long takes, and Lubezki has proven his aptitude with such shooting conditions time and again. He won the Oscar for his work last year on Cuarón’s Gravity and should probably have another two for his lensing of Cuarón’s Children of Men and Terrence Malick’s gorgeous The Tree of Life. No matter. He will most likely win his second award in a row this year.

Except for a short segment in the omnibus film To Each His Own Cinema, this is Lubezki’s first collaboration with Iñárritu, but the two are already hard at work shooting another film together – The Revenant, starring Leonardo Dicaprio, which is due out at the end of this year. If the results of Birdman are any indication, we should all be very excited about the next collaboration from these two unique artists.

Mr. Turner – If it were not for the brilliant, boundary-pushing work of Lubezki, cinematographer Dick Pope’s painterly lensing of Mike Leigh’s JMW Turner biopic would be this year’s hands-down winner. It is just as deserving, and in many ways, it is the more classical nominee, a throwback to the old style of shooting a film. While Lubezki’s camera flies in and out of scenes like it is on a mission, Pope carefully crafts each moment, each frame for maximum impact.

The film is about a painter who is famous for his impressionist landscapes, and Pope steps up to the challenge of matching the story of England’s greatest artist with some of the most beautiful compositions you are ever likely to see. While several sequences are set up to recreate the look and feel of a Turner painting in real life, the work in between these bravura scenes is just as stark and just as rewarding.

If you are a voter, you could flip a coin to choose between these two pictures and come up with a deserving winner every time. The best part of both pieces is how the cinematography is integrated into the storytelling. These are not self-conscious gimmicks. Lubezki’s unbroken take is indicative of the maelstrom of activity constantly swirling around the characters in Birdman, while Pope’s picture-perfect frames are a window into the world as an artist might see it. When it comes to picking a winner, you’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.

Ida – One of the best things about the cinematographers’ branch is that its members are willing to look outside the box for nominees. From Poland, Ida is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film this year, in addition to this cinematography nod. It is highly deserving of the recognition in both cases. Shot in black and white by the team of Lukasz Zal and Ryszard Lenczewski, Ida tells the story of a Catholic nun who spends a few nights with a less-than-virtuous aunt before taking her final vows.

Similar to Pope’s work on Mr. Turner, Zal and Lenczewski let the framing do the work for them, and some of their choices are so brilliant as to boggle the mind. These are two characters trapped by circumstance and convention, and in nearly every scene, Zal and Lenczewski place objects in the frame to trap them further. From car trunks to lamp posts to electrical wires, these two women are constantly placed in boxes inside boxes, a stunning evocation of the characters’ mindsets and their place within the context of society as a whole.

The Grand Budapest Hotel – Robert Yeoman is probably the least assuming of the nominees this year, having shot mostly either independent or studio comedies throughout his career. He has been the director of photography on every one of director Wes Anderson’s live-action films, which makes a certain amount of sense. Anderson has such a unique and specific visual style that his films could almost only be shot by one person, someone who understands exactly what the director is going for.

As in each of their previous collaborations, Yeoman does a great job of balancing Anderson’s usual hyperactivity with an unfailing precision of movement and framing. Yeoman and Anderson favor symmetrical setups and proscenium staging, allowing for the maximum amount of action to take place within the dollhouse like structure of a film in which characters move in packs from room to room and set to set.

My only real problem with this nomination is how much the work feels of a piece with what Yeoman and Anderson have done before. They are not stretching their visual style so much as fine tuning it, but perhaps that is okay when the style itself is so striking. As I have mentioned, The Grand Budapest Hotel is the first of Anderson’s films to catch on with the Academy in a big way, and that success has swept up a lot of Anderson’s below-the-line collaborators, Yeoman among them.

Unbroken – Roger Deakins is a god among cinematographers and rightly so. His work with the Coen brothers alone is enough to place him in the pantheon of the greatest of all time (Fargo, No Country for Old Men, True Grit, The Man Who Wasn’t There, etc.), not to mention his incomparable work on films such as The Shawshank Redemption, Skyfall, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. A living legend, this is his 12th nomination in this category. He has never won, and this will not be the year that streak ends.

As good as Deakins is, Unbroken stands as the least impressive among these nominees, primarily because it falls into the trap of so many recent war films – desaturated colors, poorly integrated effects, and an overreliance on grand vistas that mean little in context. Deakins never gives less than 100 percent, and he has been highly deserving of all his previous nominations, but this seems like one case in which name recognition alone was enough to get him onto the shortlist.

The final analysis

As I said, you cannot go wrong with either Birdman or Mr. Turner, but now that Lubezki already has the gold seal of approval from the Academy, there seems to be little in the way of a repeat win in this category.

Will win: Birdman

Should win: Birdman

Wish it had been here: Goodbye to Language

New movie review: Birdman

Michael Keaton plays Riggan Thompson, who cannot bear to look at the man in the mirror in Birdman.

What we talk about when we talk about fame depends largely on when we are talking about it. A thousand years ago, the question may have been: Are you a member of a royal family or perhaps an explorer? A hundred years ago, are you in politics or some kind of war hero? Twenty years ago, are you on TV or the covers of magazines? Today, have you gone viral or how many followers do you have?

If it has not already, the phrase “Twitter followers” will soon be redundant. There are more people being followed on Twitter and more followers than many major religions can boast. The world of social media is a religion unto itself, full of arbitrary rules, rituals, hysteria, exploitation, abuse, worship, true believers, and those just dipping their toes in the water. The one thing it cannot offer – what most religions purport to offer – is any lasting meaning.

So what of art and artists and their search for a deeper truth? Is it even out there to find, or is it simply too ephemeral to grasp? In a hashtag democracy, in which influence and importance are measured in charts of trending topics, what does it take to create something of value? If it cannot be validated or dismissed in 140 characters, does it even have value? These are the preoccupations of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s dazzling new film Birdman (or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance).

The director of Biutiful and the communication-breakdown trilogy of Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel, Iñárritu has always made films about humans’ deep desire to connect with one another and their tragic inability to do so. Now, he drops his latest movie into a world in which it is easier than ever to make connections with people around the globe, but Iñárritu and co-writers Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, and Armando Bo tackle head on the inherent superficiality of those connections.

Michael Keaton plays Riggan Thompson, an actor famous for a superhero franchise he made two decades ago but who now wants only to leave a legacy of honesty and artistic integrity. In that pursuit, he mounts an adaptation of Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” on Broadway. It is a telling choice for a man who equates respect and admiration with love, though what he desires is all three.

For this role, Keaton is playing so many layers with such deftness and acuity that the onus is on the audience to keep up as he steps in and out of depression, madness, and mania. Thompson is a man who struggles everyday with who he is, who he was, who he wants to be, and whether he has any choice in the matter. Only an actor as comfortable in his own skin as Keaton could portray a character so uncomfortable in his.

Put another way, Keaton disappears into the role of an actor playing a character he wrote to be autobiographical while remaining true to his source material, and at the same time, he is haunted by the power of a role he cannot escape. If that description is difficult to decipher, it is not half as difficult as it would be to perform, but Keaton makes it look easy. He hits every nuance in every beat without ever giving the audience the sense the wheels are turning. It is instinctual. It is feral. It is brilliant.

To find one performer in a film acting on that level is a small miracle. To find a whole cast matching that energy and intensity, well, that is Birdman. While Naomi Watts, Zach Galifianakis, Amy Ryan, and Andrea Riseborough are doing invaluable work on the margins of the story, Edward Norton and Emma Stone shine in key supporting roles, respectively, as an actor whose only obligation is to the truth and a daughter whose truth may be too much to bear.

There is no real villain of the piece, just a lot of people trying their best to be honest to themselves or lying to themselves about how much honesty they want regardless of who gets hurt in the process. Norton’s consummate stage professional Mike Shiner is the epitome of this. Brought in as a replacement in Thompson’s production, Shiner is a magnificent actor who makes the play better but whose every action undermines the heart of what Thompson is trying to create.

Norton is excellent every time he creates havoc for everyone else by searching for his own truth, but his best moments are the quiet rooftop conversations he shares with Stone. Stone is Sam, Thompson’s drug addict daughter who is fresh out of rehab. Sam and Mike try to connect, they try to be honest with each other, but they cannot.

They resort to truth or dare – a wonderful metaphor for people’s inability to tell the truth without playing games – and much to Sam’s chagrin, Mike chooses truth every time. Truth is all that matters to him, even though, as he says, he only ever finds it on the stage. Sam wants dare. She wants excitement. She wants something more than words.

This is why, when her father comes to her to apologize for not being there for her, she can take no more. She erupts like a volcano spewing vitriol. She strikes him where she knows it will hurt the most: his irrelevance. He does not matter and never will matter. He does not have Twitter or Facebook, she says. He is not a trending topic. His play could run forever, and no one will care because it will never get a million views on YouTube or feature on some popular reality series.  

She intends to cut him to the bone and does, but in the same breath, she delivers an ironic indictment of her own generation. By tearing her father down for failing to keep up with the culture, she is exposing just how perverted and backward that culture has become. It is less a turning point than a statement of purpose, clueing the audience into the meaning of what has come before and what is yet to come.

In these moments, Stone is perfect, and when she reaches the point where she knows she has gone too far, she stops, but the camera holds on her face. Tears well in her eyes, but she cannot cry. She meant what she said but hates that she said it. She hates that she meant it. The beginning of an apology escapes her lips: “Dad …,” she says. But she cannot go on, and he does not turn to her. She has shamed herself more than him and slinks out of the room, leaving her father to slip deeper into the madness that has enveloped him.

He is falling, and nothing can stop him. That propulsive downward spiral is matched by Iñárritu and director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki’s shooting style. Except for the prologue and a single climactic montage, the whole film is structured and shot to look like one unbroken take. The few edits employed are seamlessly integrated into the camera movements, and though the story takes place over days, each new scene plays out uninterrupted in real time.

What this means for viewers is that they dive headlong into the action, and for two hours, they never get a chance to breathe. The anxiety builds for the audience and the characters in equal measure, and because the camera never looks away from the pain, the guilt, and the shame, the audience does not get to avert its eyes either.

This is what it is to create, to pour your heart into something, to spill blood for something. Most of us never look up from our phones or our laptops or our televisions long enough to experience anything so unremittingly real. But Iñárritu has been through it, and he knows the feeling of constructing truth out of nothingness. Keaton and the rest of the cast know that feeling, too. And now, because we have the chance to live the process with Riggan Thompson, maybe we in the audience can get a little closer to knowing that feeling.

See it? Yes.