Spotlight Review - 8 Reasons Why It Deserves To Be An Oscar Favourite

6. Visual Dialogue

One of my all-time favourite filmmaking stories comes from The Silence Of The Lambs. For the scene where Clarice reveals her harrowing past to a caged Dr Lecter, the plan was to initially have a flashback with the actor's lines serving as narration. However, the performances from Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins were so evocative, that, after yelling cut, Jonathan Demme gleefully dropped any location shooting, happy to just hold on the actor's faces. It's using dialogue to tell a visual story, something that in concept seems to work against the medium we're in and is thus highly difficult to pull off; it takes electric dialogue and measured delivery. Silence did it, and twenty-five years later a film also vying for Best Picture has done the same. Spotlight is mostly lengthy, multi-character dialogue scenes, with anything more exciting than two people walking and talking described rather than shown, and plenty of key players talked about a lot more than they appear on screen. Yet thanks to those performances, and the general descriptiveness of the dialogue, it becomes something incredibly engrossing; we never see a priest and a child together, let alone any of the real horrors of the story, yet you can feel the impact of it all. Beyond that, the tone and vocabulary of the script escalates over time, mirroring the character's awareness - when we finally hear (and we do only hear - any images are purely in your mind) in more detail what's being going on the words hit hard.