Frame by Frame: Becky (2020)

Year – 2020
Decade – 2020s
Cinematographer – Greta Zozula (Instagram)
Director – Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion
Aspect Ratio – 2.40
Genre – Horror; Home Invasion
Camera – Alexa Mini
Lenses – Cooke Anamorphic/i as the main lenses;
45-90mm Hawk zoom for most scenes with Dominick (Kevin James);
24-290mm Angenieux zoom for a few long lens and zoom shots;
50mm Kowa for some deep woods handheld work
Format – Digital capture with Super35-sized sensor; Anamorphic lenses
Categories – Close-Ups; Wide Shots; Car shots; Mirrors/Reflections; Shafts of Light; Frames Within Frames; Unusual Camera Perspectives; High and Low Angles; Night Exteriors; Silhouettes

The Movie
A gory home invasion thriller described by its co-directors as “an ultra-violent Home Alone,” only with precocious Macaulay Culkin replaced by rage-filled teen Lulu Wilson and the Wet Bandits now a gang of Neo Nazis led by Kevin James. As studio tentpoles abandoned the summer movie season amid nationwide Covid-19 shutdowns, Becky filled the void with an extended drive-in theater run, which included a weekend in June as the top grossing film in the country.

Opening Credits

Doubling

Becky opens with a Hitchcockian bit of doubling, matching the frames of Becky’s world with that of the film’s incarcerated villains to link to characters.

Family Dinner

Walkie Showdown

One of my favorite bits in the film – the camera dollies back and forth between the characters, using a foreground tree as an element to wipe the frame and blend the shots. Those blended dolly shots keep punching in closer and closer until reaching a shot where the characters share the same frame, inches apart.