A murder happens. A suspect appears. The evidence looks convincing. The audience forms an opinion.
Then the film changes one detail.
Suddenly, the person who looked guilty does not look quite so guilty anymore. The witness remembers something differently. The victim gains a history. The detective makes a mistake. The audience starts questioning its own judgment.
That shift sits at the heart of some of cinema’s greatest crime stories.
It also raises an uncomfortable question about the way we watch films and the way we judge people outside them.
Does film analysis matter partly because it trains us to question the first version of a story?
The question becomes harder in a society where crime reports arrive constantly. News alerts reduce complicated cases to headlines. Social media turns suspects into villains before trials finish. A photograph, a police statement or a short video can create an opinion within seconds.
Cinema operates differently. A good film can make an audience wait.
It can withhold information. It can present the same event through different eyes. It can make a criminal frightening, sympathetic, pathetic or ordinary without asking the audience to accept any one version as truth.
Akira Kurosawa built an entire film around that problem.
In ‘Rashomon’ (1950), a murder produces several conflicting accounts. Each person tells a different version of what happened. Each version feels convincing for a moment. Then another version arrives.
The Woodcutter eventually says, “I don’t understand. I just don’t understand.”
That sentence may describe the uncomfortable position of the viewer better than any film theory could.
We do not always know what happened. Yet we often behave as if we do.
The Crime Film Does Not Always Give Us a Criminal
Crime cinema often begins with a simple question.
Who did it?
The better films often replace that question with another.
What makes us believe we know who did it?
That distinction changes film analysis.
A viewer can watch ‘Rashomon’ as a murder mystery. A deeper reading turns the film into an examination of memory, ego, fear and self-preservation. The crime remains important. The human reaction to the crime becomes more important.
The Commoner says, “It’s human to lie. Most of the time we can’t even be honest with ourselves.”
Kurosawa does not offer a neat answer to the murder. The competing testimonies remain unresolved. That uncertainty forces the audience to examine the people telling the stories.
The film asks the viewer to sit with incomplete information.
That experience has a strange connection with real crime reporting.
A headline rarely contains the entire case. A photograph rarely contains the entire person. A witness statement rarely contains every detail. A first report can change after investigators gather more evidence.
Cinema can make that problem visible. Film analysis makes the problem harder to ignore.
What Does an Open Mind Actually Mean Inside a Cinema?
An open mind does not mean believing every character.
It does not mean excusing a criminal.
It does not mean treating every explanation as equally credible.
It means allowing the film to challenge the first judgment.
That distinction matters.
‘12 Angry Men’ offers one of the clearest examples. Sidney Lumet places twelve jurors inside one room and makes them examine a murder case. One juror refuses to accept the initial verdict without discussion.
The film never confirms the defendant’s innocence. It focuses on reasonable doubt.
Juror 8 says, “There were a lot of details that never came out.”
That line captures a central problem with judgment. Missing information can look like irrelevant information until it changes the entire case.
Sidney Lumet spent much of his career examining law, justice and moral judgment. PBS notes that his films repeatedly questioned how people treat each other within systems of law.
His cinema rarely gives morality a clean shape. That makes his films valuable for analysis. The viewer has to examine evidence, prejudice and personal emotion at the same time.
Can a Film Make Us Question Our Own Judgment?
This may be the most interesting connection between film analysis and social behavior.
Most viewers enter a film with assumptions.
We decide who looks trustworthy. We decide who looks dangerous. We decide who deserves sympathy.
Filmmakers know this. They use music, framing, editing, performance and dialogue to guide those judgments. Then some directors deliberately break that trust.
A character who appears threatening receives a vulnerable close-up. A victim reveals an uncomfortable secret. A respected authority figure makes a terrible decision. A criminal explains his reasoning without receiving moral forgiveness.
The audience suddenly faces a difficult distinction.
Understanding a person does not mean approving of that person’s actions.
That distinction matters greatly in crime stories.
‘Seven’ (1995), directed by David Fincher, pushes the viewer into an even darker problem. John Doe believes his murders expose moral corruption. His reasoning sounds coherent at moments. His actions remain horrific.
The film does not ask viewers to accept his worldview.
It shows how a person can construct a complete moral argument around violence.
Near the end, Detective Somerset quotes Hemingway: “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.” He then adds, “I agree with the second part.”
The line matters because Somerset has spent the film looking directly at human cruelty.
He does not become blind to it. He becomes more conscious of it.
The Director’s Responsibility is Not Always to Give an Answer
Akira Kurosawa once wrote about cinema’s ability to combine literature, theatre, painting and music. He also described his own search for something uniquely cinematic. That idea helps explain why film analysis requires more than identifying a plot. A film communicates through images.
A character can lie through dialogue while the camera reveals something else. Editing can place two unrelated images beside each other. Silence can contradict a speech. A reaction shot can change the meaning of an entire conversation.
Martin Scorsese has written about this power in his discussion of cinema and memory. He described movies as being in an ongoing dialogue with life rather than existing as simple fantasy. He recalled how films allowed him to experience emotional truths that people often could not discuss openly.
That idea makes film analysis more than an academic exercise. The viewer studies how a film creates judgment. The viewer can then notice how easily judgment forms.
The Doubt that Crime Stories Leave Behind
Perhaps the most useful thing a crime film can leave behind is not an answer.
It is doubt.
Not doubt about whether crime matters. Crime causes real harm. Victims experience consequences that no cinematic device can soften.
The doubt concerns our certainty.
‘Rashomon’ asks whether people can tell the truth about themselves.
‘12 Angry Men’ asks whether evidence deserves examination before judgment.
‘Seven’ asks what happens when someone turns moral outrage into violence.
These films approach crime from very different directions. Yet they share one feature. They make the viewer participate. The audience does not simply receive information. It interprets information.
That process matters.
How Relevant is an Open Mind While Watching a Film?
Watching a film with an open mind creates a small space between seeing something and judging it.
That space matters.
A viewer can dislike a character and still study the character. A viewer can reject a criminal’s actions and still examine the motives written into the story. A viewer can sympathize with a victim and still question the film’s presentation of that victim.
This practice does not automatically make someone kinder or wiser. It does create repeated exposure to uncertainty.
A person watches one character tell a story. Another character contradicts it. The viewer waits for more information. The viewer revises an earlier assumption.
That pattern appears again and again in serious cinema.
Kurosawa’s ‘Rashomon’ makes it central. Lumet’s ‘12 Angry Men’ builds its entire drama around it. Fincher’s ‘Seven’ tests the viewer’s response to moral extremity.
The connection with society appears at the level of judgment.
Crime reports rarely arrive with every fact attached. People often react before investigations reach their final stage. Public opinion can move faster than evidence. Film cannot solve that problem. Film analysis can at least make the mechanism visible.
The viewer can see how easily editing creates sympathy. The viewer can see how music creates fear. The viewer can see how a camera angle changes a person’s appearance. The viewer can see how a missing piece of information changes an entire interpretation. That awareness becomes interesting outside the cinema.
A person who learns to question a film’s construction may start noticing the construction of other stories too. News stories have framing. Social media posts have framing. Photographs have framing. Crime narratives have framing. The central issue is not whether people should stop making judgments. The issue is how quickly those judgments become fixed.
Cinema’s Most Uncomfortable Question
Perhaps film analysis has less to do with finding the correct interpretation and more to do with examining how interpretation happens.
That makes crime cinema unusually powerful.
A crime story places guilt, innocence, evidence, memory, fear and morality in the same space. The viewer wants certainty. The filmmaker can refuse to provide it.
Kurosawa understood the tension.
In ‘Rashomon’, the Priest says, “If men don’t trust each other, this earth might as well be hell.”
The line sounds like a statement about trust. It can equally become a statement about judgment.
How much certainty can people demand from another person’s story? How much information must exist before suspicion becomes conviction? How often does a first impression survive because people stop looking for information that challenges it?
Cinema cannot answer those questions for society. It can place them in front of an audience and refuse to let the audience leave with an easy answer.
That may explain why film analysis still matters. The real subject may not be the crime on screen. The real subject may be the person sitting in the dark, deciding who deserves to be believed.
(The celluloid in the grid: Rashomon, 12 Angry Men, Seven)