28 Years worth of tonal shifts

Nailing down the tone of a movie is a lot harder than it looks, whether you are going to be serious or silly, or tragic or romantic or whatever. You can always tell when a movie makes a tone shift that doesn't work, that jars you right out of the story.

An obvious recent example is the Caught Stealing movie, which is a silly runabout of a crime film with some charming nonsense, and then halfway through hits the audience with some proper tragedy. And then it tries to remain a knockabout farce, but it's tainted by that heavy dose of bummer. 

It's especially hard to fuck around with tone in a drama film, and sometimes it's hard to even get a grip on the proper vibe of something like The Life of Chuck, but horror films are one area where you can wave all over the place and really get away with it. 

It is still easy to make a misstep when transitioning from farce to horror and lose the audience, but there are a load of great horror comedies that get it right - the Evil Dead films, for just one example, go from absolute slapstick to bone-chilling horror with extreme deftness.

My absolute favourite example of tonal cinematic whiplash in recent years has been the two 28 Years Later films.  To be clear, I thought both films were fucking brilliant, with fascinating things to say beyond the 'run away run away' and 'humans are the real monster, don't ya know' of most zombie films.

But I also don't blame people when they can't get on board when the Telly-Tubby Jimmy Saville parkour ninjas suddenly appear at the end of the first film. There is some real whiplash there, and that can be too much for some.

At least it gave the audience a taste of what the next sequel will do, because that's at least four movies in one. One second it's a quiet meditation of the nature of mortality; then it's the grossest, nastiest shit ever to take place in a barn; the next it's a dumb stoner buddy comedy; and then it's the most metal thing I've ever seen put on screen.

I fully understand why this kind of thing puts people off, and there are plenty movies where I can't handle that shift. But that delicate juggling act can separate the great from the good, if there is enough of an audience to go along with it.