In The Shining, when the family is being given a tour of the hotel fairly early in the movie, they get shown the walk in fridge. There is a shot of the door to the fridge from the hallway and then a cut to a shot from the back of the fridge looking toward the door. The hinges are on opposite sides between the two shot. Immersion ruined.
I’m 50:50 on if that’s a mistake or an deliberate subtle error. There’s a lot of stuff in The Shining that’s clearly intentionally wrong (lighting, building layout, maps, event continuity, etc…) in order to subconsciously reinforce the unnatural aura of the hotel. Of course that also gives Kubrick a free license to cut corners.
Definitely could be the case, but it seems like an even smaller detail than a lot of those other, intentional discontinuities. Like I noticed it while watching it with someone and asked them to rewind to check and they didn’t believe me until I convinced them to rewind.
A similar thing happened at the very end of the new Frankenstein movie, but I think this was intentional. The shot of the monster is flipped, so all his scars are mirrored. I think this is meant to sort of break the fourth wall and imply a mirror being held up to the audience and showing us to be the monster as part of the final humanization of the character.
So decision like this definitely get made for story telling purposes. There’s a video essay by, I think, CinemaStix about shots that were mirrored for various reasons. It’s a good watch.
In The Shining, when the family is being given a tour of the hotel fairly early in the movie, they get shown the walk in fridge. There is a shot of the door to the fridge from the hallway and then a cut to a shot from the back of the fridge looking toward the door. The hinges are on opposite sides between the two shot. Immersion ruined.
I’m 50:50 on if that’s a mistake or an deliberate subtle error. There’s a lot of stuff in The Shining that’s clearly intentionally wrong (lighting, building layout, maps, event continuity, etc…) in order to subconsciously reinforce the unnatural aura of the hotel. Of course that also gives Kubrick a free license to cut corners.
Definitely could be the case, but it seems like an even smaller detail than a lot of those other, intentional discontinuities. Like I noticed it while watching it with someone and asked them to rewind to check and they didn’t believe me until I convinced them to rewind.
A similar thing happened at the very end of the new Frankenstein movie, but I think this was intentional. The shot of the monster is flipped, so all his scars are mirrored. I think this is meant to sort of break the fourth wall and imply a mirror being held up to the audience and showing us to be the monster as part of the final humanization of the character.
So decision like this definitely get made for story telling purposes. There’s a video essay by, I think, CinemaStix about shots that were mirrored for various reasons. It’s a good watch.