Greg's Thriller Analysis (Usual Suspects)

Greg's Analysis

The Usual Suspects

In the opening of The Usual Suspects, we see a person light up a whole box of matches, smoke a cigarette and drop the matches onto a line of flammable liquid (probably petrol). We follow this chain of fire as it passes some dead bodies and we ask the question 'What has happened here?'. In this short sequence, I noticed that there is very little lighting and an absence of bright colours. The only light that we really see is from the fire.

At this point the fire is extinguished by Kaiser. He is wearing black clothes and his identity is unknown. This creates a lot of mystery around this character and makes us ask the question 'Who is he?' When the other guy says his name, I noticed the soundtrack increase in volume a little, which tells me that he is an important character. He doesn't say much either. His only lines are 'How are you doing, kid?', 'Ready?', and '12:30'

Just before Kaiser kills the guy, we cut away to outside the location (which we find out is on a ship). We hear two gunshots, and we ask the question 'Why was there two gunshots?' We know one of them was for the guy, but we don't know why he fired the other shot.

Afterwards we see him light the petrol again and the ship explodes. As we watch the fire chain go, we see more bodies and it intrigues us more. We don't see the ship in flames, but only the mushroom cloud left by the explosion.

We then get a dissolve to a brightly lit room with someone in the middle who says 'it all started 6 weeks ago...'. From this I know that the film will revolve around a flashback that shows us the events leading up to the ship