CineLinkr #206: The Story Behind the Puzzle
Spoilers ahead: for the puzzle and the movies/games
This post assumes you've already solved the puzzle. It reveals all categories and their connections, and discusses plot details, endings, and spoilers for featured movies/games throughout.
The Grilling and Under Suspicion are related more closely than their titles suggest. The latter remakes the former's interrogation story. Apparently one long, miserable night at the station deserved another language.
🟢 Easy: The dead intervene to protect the living
Movies: Casper · The Crow · Dragonfly · The Heavenly Kid
Casper assists Kat and her father, while Eric Draven protects Sarah during his return in The Crow. Being dead leaves these characters with unfinished responsibilities as well as unfinished business.
The Heavenly Kid gives its deceased rebel a guardian-angel assignment. Dragonfly hides the protective purpose of its supernatural messages much longer, which is why this category carries a spoiler warning. The shared action is reaching back to help someone still alive.
🟡 Medium: Investigations expose institutional wrongdoing
Movies: Serpico · Minamata · Collective · The Report
Frank Serpico fights corruption inside the NYPD. W. Eugene Smith's photographs in Minamata document mercury poisoning and the people responsible for it. Their evidence points beyond a single bad decision toward organizations that want the problem kept quiet.
The documentary Collective follows journalists investigating Romania's health system after the Colectiv nightclub fire. The Report puts Adam Driver at a desk with the evidence of CIA torture. Reading documents can be cinematic when the people who wrote them would rather you did not.
🔵 Hard: An interrogation dominates the central conflict
Movies: Death and the Maiden · The Offence · The Grilling · Under Suspicion
The questions themselves become the action. In Death and the Maiden, a former political prisoner confronts a man she believes tortured her. No badge can settle the conflict for her.
The Offence follows a detective whose violence turns the interrogation back upon him. The Grilling, originally titled Garde à vue, and its remake Under Suspicion make a suspect's account increasingly difficult to separate from the pressure applied to it.
After the reveal, the important feature is how much dramatic weight the questioning carries. A confession might end a procedural scene; in these films, the struggle to obtain one is the story's main battleground.
🟣 Tricky: Ancient Rome in historical epics
Movies: Quo Vadis · Ben-Hur · Spartacus · The Fall of the Roman Empire
Rome supplies the power structure even when the central character lives far from its throne. Ben-Hur places a personal rivalry within Roman rule; Spartacus follows a slave revolt against that rule.
Quo Vadis turns to Nero's Rome and the persecution of Christians. The Fall of the Roman Empire tackles imperial politics on a huge physical scale. Ben-Hur's MGM Camera 65 and the latter film's Ultra Panavision 70 add literal width to the spectacle.
The answer is a historical world and a mode of filmmaking, rather than a shared hero or filmmaker. Once Rome appears, the chariots and palaces stop looking like unrelated expensive problems.
The interrogation films make a chair and a question feel more threatening than an army. Today's PixelLinkr puzzle begins several adventures behind bars before giving its captives somewhere to go.