Gridlock
I thoroughly enjoyed this film. The beginning really caught my attention because of the music. It seemed happy and catchy and put me at ease. Then the background came into focus and produced a stark contrast between the happy song about a sunny day and a man stuck in traffic during a snowstorm. It seemed to foreshadow something in a way.
The man stuck in this traffic seems to be highly stressed out. He’s yelling at the woman on the radio and other drivers, popping pills, glancing tersely at his watch, and rubbing his head in an almost OCD kind of way. It seems as if he is late for something, so when he picks up the phone to call his family, we assume that he’s warning them he’s stuck in traffic. His daughter supposedly answers, and while he’s asking to speak for his wife, she accidentally pulls the answering machine off and the table and it slams into the ground. This is accompanied by the man slamming on his breaks in traffic - perhaps a symbol of sorts for how they both should have been paying closer attention and noticed that something wasn’t right?
When the little girl tells the man that her mother is upstairs with Uncle Wim, he at first tries to blow it off. But then, as he gives her a task, the shot zooms in on his mouth, and we don’t hear what he says to the girl, once again illustrating that a vital piece of information is missing - that he called the wrong family.
When the little girl gets back to the phone and tells her story, we see what happened while she talks about it. This part of the movie was filmed very dramatically - parts of it are slowed down, there’s dramatic and moving music in the background, intense close ups of everyone, and the only sounds are the girl telling the story and the people dying. It all builds and builds, until right at the last second the man realizes that he called the wrong number because his family does not have a swimming pool. The building up of the deaths makes the realization all the more stark in comparison. And then the film ends with credits that have an ironically upbeat song. Like, oops, my bad, wrong number. Even though his wrong number caused the death of two people. Over all, even though it was tragic in a way, I thought it was pretty entertaining. And maybe people aught to slow down and be a little more careful.
