Locked Down

Coming up on a full year of the first pandemic wave last March, the trailer for Locked Down will look—and sound—familiar to anyone accustomed to the work-from-home lifestyle: A ringtone and the notification that someone’s entered the room in Zoom (replete with the potato camera quality of laptops, to match).

Things seem okay until about the fifteen-second mark, when it becomes clear that Linda is very much not okay. This leads into the acoustic version of the track “Shaky Ground” by Freedom Fry, a recent (2017) track likely chosen as much for its recency as it was for its lyrics, “nobody wants to live alone,” which works well for its new purpose as a quarantine anthem of sorts. At 0:34 we get another punchline, with the music cutting out for a moment much like any other rom-com/comedy trailer.

“Now I’m on shaky ground” the singer intones, a perfect commentary on the unfolding scenes that we all remember from last year, accompanied by imagery of masked-up pedestrians and a shopper bearing dozens of rolls of toiler paper under their arms. (“Alright, how many asses have you got,” our protagonist comments.)

Things take a drastic turn in tone, however, at about the minute mark with the arrival of the release date card (January 14th) and a complete change in tune, to a remix of “Feelin’ Good” by Nina Simone. There are multiple remixes and rearrangements of this song out there, but this appears to be a new one.

Subverting expectations, it turns out this would-be rom-com is more of a heist flick: “It’s a new dawn / it’s a new day,” Simone sings against an isolated brass track, while we see the crime being plotted out. By the two-minute mark the beat has completely changed, hinging around the descending bass motif as the reference point for the remix.

The arrangement reaches near-epic intensity by 2:08 with additional brass in the upper register and some looping high vocals to match, while a montage is shown.

Taken as a whole, the trailer completely plays with our expectations. First, it leans into the one style of editing and one choice of music, heavily suggesting what many of us probably expect out of a movie about last year’s (and the ongoing) lockdown by using comedy-trailer tropes. However, it then takes advantage of that fact by delivering something else entirely in the back half, with almost completely different music and editing (albeit retaining a bit of the comedic edge). Maybe we should be expecting the unexpected at this point when the subject matter is focused on our unprecedented times. In doing so, the film promises to supersede the level of trivial novelty and deliver something at least a little more substantial with the heist angle, imagining additional repercussions of our current predicament.

— Curtis Perry