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Abstract
by Dr David Sweeney
Fear X, the third feature film by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, and his first in English, is a thriller which also contains elements of psychological horror.
The protagonist, Harry (John Turturro), a mall security guard, travels from his Wisconsin home to a small town in Montana in search of the killer of his wife, Claire, who died in a shooting, in which a DEA agent was also killed, at the mall where Harry works.
Stylistically, Fear X marks a departure from the realism of Refn’s first two films, Pusher (1996) and Bleeder (1999), both of which are set in blue-collar Copenhagen neighbourhoods and were shot entirely on location. Fear X sees Refn use sets for the first time and interiors are of prime importance to the film.
Harry’s living room in Wisconsin is dominated by a ‘suspect wall’ on which he has pinned numerous photographs taken from CCTV footage of the mall, which Harry views obsessively in the hope of identifying Claire’s killer, along with articles pertaining to her death; the hotel he books into in Montana – where much of the film, including its visually remarkable climax, is set - recalls both the Overlook in Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) and the Earle in Barton Fink (Joel Coen, 1991), which also starred Turturro in the titular role. Like those films – as well as two of the key influences on Barton Fink, Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) and The Tenant (1976) - Fear X uses physical interiors to represent the mental state of its central character.
I will focus in particular on how Fear X achieves the representation of Harry’s mental state through set design along with the use of what Kristin Thompson terms ‘cinematic excess’ – ‘an inassimilable materiality of a film, visual or aural, that cannot fit into the narrative snugly and so attracts attention’ – including the technique of ‘mindscreen’, a term coined by Bruce Katwin to describe a type of ‘first-person’ film-making that represents the ‘mind’s eye’ of a character. This is particularly evident in the climax, which also demonstrates the influence of experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage.
About the speaker
Dr David Sweeney is a lecturer in the Glasgow School of Art’s Design History and Theory department where he specialises in popular culture.
He is the author of the books The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Genre, Gender, Glamour (LUP, 2024), Scanned Clean: (Re)Reading Michael Marshall Smith in the Digital Age (Subterranean Press, 2022) and The OA (Auteur/LUP, 2022), a critical study of the Netflix series of the same name.
How to join
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