Unknown

Unknown (2011)
Liam Neeson stars in "Unknown", a filmed directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, also starring Diane Kruger and January Jones. The film's plot involves the main character who is played by Liam Neeson awakening from a coma and discovering his world turned upside down; his identity has been stolen from him and nobody believes him when he tries to explain who he is, not even his own wife, who appears to not even know him at all. We, as an audience, are too baffled along with Neeson when we are taken with him to discover what has really happened. He sets out to prove who he is, with the help of a young woman.
The film involves a lot of tension - parts of the film have more suspense than others. For example, there is an eerie atmosphere throughout the club scene, the loud, booming diagetic sound of the music creates a disorienting and threatening feel to it. The screen is also very dark and the viewers share the main character's confusion with this effect.
In "Unknown" the males throughout are definitely the more dominant characters. But also, there is a point when the audience think that the main character's wife is a villain because she is in on the act with the people who have taken away his life (so to speak), but later we realise when she confronts him that she is being made to do it. Also, Neeson has a female accomplice when he searches for answers, so women are fairly made to look like they have some sense of authority in this film, maybe because it is a modern film. The same things may not have applied if the film was made and directed in the 20th century. However,  Laura Mulvey's theory, The Maze Gale states that women are merely seen as objects on screen, as the male erotic desire, where men are active and females are passive. They do not have agency according to this and do not move any plots forward, because cinema as a whole reflects a patriarchial, male dominated society.

The music in the film is used cleverly and at appropriate times. There is a build up of tension and suspense when Liam Neeson confronts his wife after his car accident when he wakes up from the coma, and she is completely unaware of who he is, and appears to be married to the man who has taken his identity and used it for himself. There are creepy sounds with deep notes to show the main character's confusion and terror, because the audience too want answers as to why nobody knows who he is.
Most of the film is in Liam Neeson's point of view so that the audience are discovering things with him along his quest to prove himself. Therefore, there are a lot of close-ups used to show the emotion on each character's face, because the majority of them are expressing very different emotions from one another.

The trailer shows several aspects of a typical thriller. At the beginning we see a relatively normal looking couple, but then the sound in the background makes us think otherwise when the transition changes to show a blurry vision of a doctor talking to the main character. He is disoriented and confused, and we see several quick shots of the car crashing in slow motion, creating terror and eyecatching movement. We also see a few quick extreme close-ups of Martin Harris, the main character when he is hospitalised, but when his wife calls another man by his name there is a screechy noise that gets deeper which plays in the background, as Liam Neeson and the audience become confused. The crashing noises coming from the cars and the quick scene changes to flashing luminous lights in a club make the audience feel just as confused as he is feeling, when he explains how everyone thinks he is crazy for giving himself his own identity. The constant creepy and unstable music playing throughout the trailer allows us to put ourselves in his shoes, and feel just as horrified as he does.