Narrative and AS thriller opening

My foundation production was a thriller film opening (15) in which a father wakes one morning a troubled sleep that has been haunted by dreams of his late wife and the happy family life that he has now lost with her death. It is clear that visual sound codes that something real has disturbed him in his sleep because after he is jolted awake he checks his teenage sons bedroom door and, momentarily reassured, goes through his morning routine in the bathroom and then in the kitchen, only to realise with a sickening jolt that his son is missing torn family photographs lie in the snow outside as he runs in terror towards the roaring dam.

Barthes- my narrative technique draws heavily on visual and sound codes to create meaning. The audience is invited to interpret the apparent presence of the dead wife in the family bathroom as the visual emblem of the grieving husband overpowering sense of loss. Likewise, the running in the tap in the bathroom and equally another running tap in the kitchen create a sense of disruption of normal routine, order and a sense of uneasiness in the protagonist and the audience.

If i was to apply Todorov narrative framework here i would say that i was drawing the audience in to my narrative by sharing with them how the widow's fathers uneasy sense of stability bringing his young child on his own is quickly disrupted in the days leading up to christmas, when families normally celebrate their joy in their unity. The open 'disequilibrium" is the crisis for the father when he flings his son's door open to find the room empty and runs in panic out in the snow. Following his intuition that the son may be near the dangerous weir. Clues in the snow that the son has passed this way are the torn up family photos. The photos of the beloved mother denote the strength of the son's love and the fact that they are torn connote his anguish and anger, indicating that he may be suicidal. For Barthes, the connotations within an image are all the visual elements that can be decoded - the symbolic message rather than the literal message. 

Another way in which i presented the unhappiness and uneasiness of the situation the father finds himself in is the snow that smothers the landscape around him. Rather like Shelley's Frankenstein, the harsh and dangerous icy landscape can symbolise the journey in which characters, such as the father, find themselves in. The boy is missing in a scene of coldness and vulnerability. The snow, following Barthes decoding of visual elements, provide a deadly setting to the story. The use of colour correction was also vital in that the saturation of the frames was decreased so that the harsh, yet brutal coldness is conveyed to the audience.

Vladimir Propp's theory recognised the use of different character types in most stories. The hero, usually male, is the agent who restores the narrative equilibrium often by 'embarking' upon a quest (ir search). The father, i believe, is the hero in this narrative as it is he who has to find his son and make sense of the mysterious happenings that follow the death of his wife - rather like the quest Propp states in his theory.