Read the room: Subtitles are unlocking new features for filmmakers

“Tentacles squelching wetly” is our favourite here at HT Wknd. (That’s from Season 4 of Stranger Things).

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You can laugh at them, revel in them, or turn them off, but same-language subtitles are altering not just the viewing experience but the storytelling one too.

The audience is often reading as they watch. How is this a good thing? Let us count the ways.

Perhaps the most significant thing same-language subtitling has done is allow filmmakers to alter the soundscape. Characters can now mumble or whisper, lapse into a dialect or another language, mutter to themselves during an explosive event, or mouth iconic lines amid soaring music.

Enunciation was crucial before the same-language subtitle. Music was modulated around speech. The most dramatic moments in cinematic sound — think of the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) — had to necessarily be devoid of words.

Add subtitles and the field breaks wide open. Dialects can be embraced. Unfamiliar accents can take centrestage (imagine trying to watch the series Derry Girls without the text to help). Guns and bombs can overlap with audio.

Reality can be restored. People can be snide, soft, sotto voce.

In the mini-series White House Plumbers (2023; based on the illegal Watergate wiretap operation), the opening scene features muttering and Spanish. Viewers needn’t worry they’ve missed anything. The subtitles more or less confirm that it’s frustrated muttering in Spanish (as an inept burglar attempts to pick a lock).

In Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023), as the Trinity nuclear test unfolds in the New Mexico desert, the lead character (Cillian Murphy) looks through a window and whispers. One would never get the crucial lines, in their realistic awe-struck whisper, without the text at the bottom of the screen. Nolan prefers muffled dialogue, he has said, because it allows him “to mimic reality”. (He said this in the context of his 2020 film Tenet, which was both unreal and indecipherable, despite the subtitles; but even there, the text did help.)

“Filmmakers are conscious of the fact that people of all backgrounds are goingto be reading as they watch their films,” says Nasreen Munni Kabir, a producer and director who also serves as a subtitler and has worked, in this capacity, on more than 800 films, including Shah Rukh Khan’s Pathaan (2023) and Ponniyin Selvan: 1 and 2 (2022-23).

Documentary filmmaker Shaunak Sen of the Oscar-nominated documentary All That Breathes (2022), considers the text so vital to his storytelling that he subtitles all his own work.

“It gives a filmmaker greater confidence to know that quick chatter and pacy dialogue, which would otherwise be lost on the viewer, is being conveyed,” he says. Along with the colour palette, textures of sound and lens magnification, “one smaller weapon in your arsenal, is the subtitle,” he says, adding, “I find subtitles oddly liberating. I enjoy them as a kind of a anticipated entity that’s a subset of the broader film that one is making. It helps me hone in on the particularities in the situated, cultural details of the story, while knowing that there will be a universally accessible register because of the subtitles.”

The text builds a deeper relationship with the audience. The screen may go black for effect; the notes for music tell us we’re still in the story. A hazy figure may lumber into a gloomy frame; we know we can focus on watching until the text tells us it’s time to listen too.

Additionally, subtitles free the viewer to watch in the settings most easily available to them. They can watch-listen-read during a noisy commute, or in a crowded room; on headphones or despite indifferent audio.

The struggles that remain include working out how to put sounds into words, and avoid, for instance, unintentional hilarity in a tense scene. “Wet footsteps squelch” and “tense music intensifies” are not ideal accompaniments to a scenario filled with suspense and fear.

These oddities have become a kind of idiom in themselves. As the focus on subtitles as a key element and aid in storytelling grows, perhaps they will cease, and those already out there will live on as curiosities. We’ll certainly never forget “Tentacles squelching wetly”.