Psychology technique · used in 1 film

Complicit Audience Discomfort

Making viewers uneasy about an everyday habit they share with the film's villains, by showing its real cost on screen without lecturing them about it.

Examples

Where you can see it

  1. Okja (2017) poster

    Okja

    Bong Joon-ho · 2017

    You spend the film loving Okja, so the slaughterhouse sequence makes it hard to treat the meat in your own life as an abstract idea. The workers do their jobs calmly, which makes it worse. The film never tells you what to eat.

    Where to see it: The processing plant. Mija arrives where Okja is about to be slaughtered and offers a gold pig figurine to save her.

Questions

Quick answers

What is complicit audience discomfort in film?
Making viewers uneasy about an everyday habit they share with the film's villains, by showing its real cost on screen without lecturing them about it.
Which films use complicit audience discomfort?
Okja (2017).
What kind of technique is complicit audience discomfort?
It is a psychology technique. Related psychology techniques include Psychological Doubling, Unreliable Reality, Body Horror.

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