10 Opening Movie Scenes That Wanted To Make You Uncomfortable
3. Widows
Steve McQueen's tightly-wound thriller Widows opens not with a fraught shootout - well not immediately - but a decidedly more unexpected sight.
The first minute of Widows is nothing more than a shot of our protagonist, Veronica (Viola Davis), passionately making out with her husband Harry (Liam Neeson).
Another way to put it might be that Neeson is basically devouring Davis' face, and rather than cut away once their relationship has been established, McQueen lingers on it for an amount of time clearly intended to make the viewer uncomfortable.
It's such an intimate moment, captured with such dispassionate objectivity by McQueen's stationary camera, that it feels like we're intruding on an intensely private moment.
Beyond that, it's pretty much the polar opposite of what we expect from a screen kiss involving two bonafide A-listers: it's not tasteful and restrained, but sloppy in a way that feels considerably more real rather than staged for the camera.
One suspects that McQueen also intentionally chose to linger on the kiss because it's between a white man and Black woman, given that there's still a depressing lack of interracial romance in Hollywood.
By opening his film with this image, he immediately gave us something unexpected in several ways, while also prodding any bigots who happened to be watching.