'The Minus Man' sound and editing deconstruction

This teaser trailer is from Hampton Fancher's 1999 thriller 'The Minus Man'. 

• The trailer begins with very upbeat non-diegetic background music which continues throughout the whole of the trailer. Despite being upbeat and lively, the non-diegetic background music has a very repetitive and somewhat creepy nature. Despite this, the background music is largely parallel to the images of couple living normal lives in bars and around the city, which is the focus of the trailer for the majority of the trailer. 

• The trailer uses mainly straight-cut edits, however some edits at the beginning of the trailer are broken up by short spaces of complete blackness. This gives the trailer a feeling of slight disorientation and abnormality which perhaps foreshadows some of the disturbing content seen at the end of the trailer. 

• Towards the end of the trailer, where the female character starts to run away for reasons unknown to the audience, the straight cut edits become more rapid however this is not reflected in the non-diegetic background music which continues exactly how it started at the beginning of the trailer. The visuals, created through the use of quick straight-cut edits, give the trailer an unexpected sense of urgency which ties into the convention of the thriller genre. 

• The non-diegetic background music comes to an abrupt stop when the corpses are shown floating in the swimming pool. This brings the trailer to an abrupt and dramatic stop as the female character looks on at the swimming pool. Following this momentary silence, the upbeat non-diegetic background music fades in for the rest of the trailer, recreating the creepy and mysterious feeling which was foreshadowed throughout the whole of the trailer, notably the mundane and ordinary actions of the two characters during the beginning of the trailer.