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Late in the fifth episode of The Listeners, premiering this Friday on Starz over a year and a half after its November 2024 debut on BBC One (itself preceded by a Toronto Film Festival premiere), star Rebecca Hall has a close-up in which her character is halfway between laughing and crying.
My initial reaction was that she was intriguingly frozen in that middle ground, but I was so interested in the feat that I went back and rewatched what amounts to maybe a five-second shot. She wasn’t frozen at all. Every muscle in her face is working, some intending to maintain the smile and its illusion, some ready to surrender entirely to desolation.
The Listeners
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