The 2015 movie with the “best exposition scene” Quentin Tarantino has ever seen: “Frankly, maybe, ever”
Exposition is one of cinema’s necessary evils, but using it in the wrong way can kill any movie’s momentum stone dead, which isn’t something that Quentin Tarantino has ever suffered from.
Some of the most iconic scenes in his filmography exist to push the plot forward, but instead of having each character dump information on the audience that fills in the blanks, the writer and director has the ability to seamlessly weave them into the narrative without making the audience feel like they should be taking notes.
Take the opening scene of Reservoir Dogs, for example; it’s a bunch of guys shooting the shit in a diner, but it also establishes their personalities, quirks, and motivations, and the same can be said of the exchange later on when Lawrence Tierney’s Joe Cabot issues the titular dogs with their codenames.
In Pulp Fiction, when John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson are driving to retrieve a mysterious briefcase, their free-flowing conversation tells the viewer who these guys are, what they do for a living, and how their mission ties back to Marsellus Wallace and his wife, Mia, setting the stage for their misadventures.
When exposition is placed in the wrong hands or used in the wrong way, it can be a chore to sit through, especially when the dialogue in question is being used to outline the mythology of a genre film. It’s expository in every way, shape, and form, almost right down to the letter, but according to Tarantino, writer and director David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows absolutely nails it.
Describing it as a “really clever horror film,” the two-time Academy Award winner wanted everyone to go into the supernatural horror flick without knowing a thing. “One of the problems with the film, to some degree, is the fact that people want to tell the story in order to get people to go see it,” he said. “For the movie to truly work, you need to go in not knowing what it’s about.”
If that’s what you did, then you’d find out what it’s about soon enough, with Tarantino branding the scene in question as “one of the best exposition scenes that I’ve seen in, frankly, maybe, ever; I actually think it’s one of the best exposition scenes.” While he didn’t go into specifics, it’s easy to figure out what he’s talking about.
With a mutilated body already discovered, It Follows kept its cards close to the chest initially, until Maika Monroe’s Jay wakes up tied to a wheelchair. The tension is nerve-shreddingly palpable as Jake Weary’s Hugh explains that, because they had sex, she’s not the target of an unknown entity that can take the shape of any person, and she won’t know who or where it is until it catches and kills her.
At the end of the day, it’s as obvious an info dump as you’re likely to see, but it’s all about the staging and the execution. In less than a minute, Mitchell lays down the rules for what’s to come, and even though Tarantino was a self-confessed fan of It Follows, he still thought he could have done it better himself.
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