Two men ring a bell. The householder opens the door. He is zapped with a stun gun. The men carry his body in. One of them takes off the shoe and socks off one of the unconscious man’s feet. The other man injects poison between two of his toes. One of the two killers sits with a gloved finger on his throat, feeling the pulse. The pulse dies, and the man turns to his partner and says: “We’re good.” He puts the socks and shoe back on the dead man’s foot. This is a scene from Michael Clayton, a film I saw recently. It is one of the most disquieting murder scenes I have seen on screen. The matter-of-factness, which comes from both how the actors play it and how the director shoots it and edits it, chills your spine. And then you tend to ponder about how much murder scenes in cinema are about style. Millions of murders have been committed on screen, but some murders are better than others. The five film murder sequences engraved in my memory are all very different from one another. Michael Clayton is one, and the others are from two Hitchcock films, one from this year’s Best Picture Oscar winner, and the last from Satyajit Ray’s worst film. Let’s quickly finish off Psycho, which has the most written-about murder sequence ever. Marion Crane is taking a shower when a shadowy figure with a dagger enters and kills her. Forty-five second-long sequence, 70 camera angles, about 90 cuts. I have seen it a dozen times, and you can only appreciate the magical craft. You watch it, and if you are very careful about your health, you check your pulse as the frenetic cuts with the birds shrieking in the background (which you only feel at a subliminal level) stop and the camera focuses, in an informative way, on the blood swilling down the drain hole. I am told liquids swirl down clockwise in the northern hemisphere and the other way in the southern. OK, Torn Curtain. Paul Newman has to kill Russian agent. Hitchcock said that he wanted to tell people how difficult it was to kill a man with one’s bare hands. Really hard work. An excruciatingly long sequence which has no music, just the grunts and gasps of the combatants, and it goes on and on till you — and this is what Hitchcock wanted you to feel — you just want Gromek to die. Finally, Newman puts his head in a gas oven and holds it there for an eternity and you are ready to move on with a sigh of relief. Clayton’s murder sequence was about quiet efficiency, Psycho was about cinematic craft, Torn Curtain was about what real killings entail. The two murder sequences in Chiriyakhana (The Zoo) are about showing you everything that’s going on while the murderer goes about his business, teasing the viewer, make a guess. The first murder shows, through quick cuts, shot in the dark, where all the suspects are, while a sitar plays in the background, and it’s a masterpiece. It gives you information and holds it back with the winking efficiency of a bikini. The second murder sequence, shot the same way, ending with the victim’s pen skidding on the paper he is writing on, is as good, though shorter. There is no particular reason to watch the rest of the movie. Ray did the film as a favour to friends, and it shows. Anton Chigur is the purest character in the history of cinema. We would call him evil, but he follows a code of conduct. He is a force by himself, outside the natural laws, or maybe he is the representative agent of the natural law. He is sensitive to the moral philosophy that we have accepted as an axiom. He asks his victim, just before he kills him, not because he wants to know the answer, but because he knows the answer: “If the rules you followed in life led to this meeting, what were those rules worth?” Then he shoots him. The phone has been ringing. As he talks on the phone, he lifts a foot casually so the trickling, rivering blood won’t stain his shoe soles. The most chilling scene in No Country For Old Men does not end in a murder. If you haven’t seen the film, do a search for the film name and “coin toss” on YouTube. You’ll get your money’s worth (though you are not spending any), and no one dies. Enjoy. If that’s the right word. (Sandipan Deb, former Editor of The Financial Express, heads the RPG Group’s forthcoming magazine venture)
