Evaluating the two twists of High Maintenance.

 HIGH MAINTENANCE TWIST EVALUATION






The first twist of High Maintenance is unexpected to the audience because the use of Mise En Scene. For example, the lighting inside the house shown in the film was dim, warm and felt quite intimate. This creates the idea that these the two people are together and subverts the expectations of the audience when the twist. The twist itself of the husband being a robot is surprising on first viewing but on rewatch there are various different foreshadowings to the twist. For example during a scene where the wife is talking to the husband she states that she would be lucky to have some "have some short mechanical sex". This at first may be seen as an spiteful insult about the couples sex life but it is actually referencing how he (and revealed later on her) are "mechanical". Another example is the husbands make up. He is very pale, unemotional and has perfect skin. This removes humanity from him but it is subtle enough for them not to be noticed at first by the audience.

The second twist of High Maintenance, in my opinion, is even more unexpected because the audience believes there is only going to be one twist. One point at which the short film used foreshadowing was when the wife says at the beginning when she says the spinach is an aphrodisiac. The audience would not pay attention to this line as they believe it's just stilted dialogue between the leads. However later on, the husband repeats the line and then the husband also repeats the same method of turning off the robot by faking intimacy between them. The repetition of the same character beats allows the audience to slowly but surely pick up on the twist. You could say poetic justice is achieved from the husband after the wife is switched off, like how he was by earlier. Peripeteia is also used as the roles of the husband and wife have been reversed.

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