Media Studies

Title – enigma – connotations of secrecy and isolation – another world.

Women are not sexualised but are part of the team. Red/blue and positioning of Mared and Siân connote their different personalities.

Font of title is eroded – signifies a world/morality which is crumbling.

Mode of address – direct gaze. Stern faces imply the seriousness of the narrative.

Costume – Mathias’ tie is undone and shirt crumpled –generic maverick cop.

The classic team of detectives, Mathias foregrounded, connoting dominance. Slightly low angle suggests the power of the law.

Setting and sky – bleak, barren, threatening – reiterate the mood of the text. Open frame connoting vastness of landscape and suggesting binary opposition of man v nature. Anchors text in Welsh setting.

Costuming is contemporary (enabling audience identification) and warm – connoting chill of both weather and mood. (Nordic noir)

Desaturated colour palette reflects bleakness of landscape and themes.

Heavily reliant on hermeneutics (enigma codes) – ‘a town full of secrets.’

Themes of the power of the past and personal v professional life – cop with ‘dark and destructive’ backstory.

Thumbnails suggest distance and isolation (proxemics, open frames). Canted angle of Mathias in his caravan imply a world gone awry and the setting and closed frame connote a man with no fixed direction, trapped by his surroundings.

Generic signifiers such as police tape and the office corridor.

Blurb – setting is the first thing mentioned – becomes a ‘character’ in its own right.

Generic conventions – ‘brilliant but troubled’ Mathias as stock character.

Themes of displacement – Mathias is newly arrived.

'Blood, soil and belonging’ – themes of family, revenge, the force of the land.

Body language of Mathias is careworn and introspective, but we maintain direct gaze from the others in the team. Again, the positioning and stance of the female characters imply strength..