Flashbulb memories are memories that are affected by our emotional state. Your brain takes a snapshot when the ground shifts under your feet, and that snapshot includes everything—the smell of coffee going cold in your cup holder, the static on the radio, the way your hands suddenly felt too heavy.
"There's no case where those things aren't critical, but with a project like this, there is no 'fix it in post' because it just can't work like that. This is a show that has about 3,000 VFX shots, and we were working with up to five different VFX vendors at times."
The first thing you notice about undertone is how quiet it is; not just in its audio mix, but in how it's shot - primarily steady wide shots that slowly pan across empty rooms, allowing your eyes to frantically scan for something amiss. It's an understated form of filmmaking that allows for the movie's scares to hit all that much harder.
For most of my life, I thought of myself as a fixed entity: This is me. These are my traits. This is who I am. I assumed I was essentially that same person who loved sugary cereal at age 8, fried chicken at 12, and tequila at 21, and who still loves those things now, even if my stomach disagrees. But this is an illusion. Neuroscience, physics, and Buddhism all agree: There is nothing fixed about us-not even close.
Glimpse them chatting in a restaurant or posing on Instagram, and you might think they have it all. The pair live in London but often travel, drawing the eyes of other guests, their skin glowing, their limbs artfully at ease. She writes affirmations on hotel stationery; he claims to taste notes of bark and tobacco in his chianti. As Sean Gilbert's dark, observant debut opens in Istanbul, this apparently perfect couple bicker and sweat, for secrets lurk behind their facade and one of them might be murder.
The premise is not the problem: a sexy young woman lures six eligible young men to her family's country pile for a weekend of romance, only to reveal to the men that they are now trapped in a reality-TV-meets-Saw farce in which they will struggle to survive. On paper, The Bachelorette-meets-femme-Jigsaw sounds potentially fun. The biggest problem is that the film never achieves the necessary suspension of disbelief;