Freeze Frame Endings: Suspended in Time

This article contains spoilers for the Season 2 finale of Severance, as well as the other films discussed herein, being as it is a discussion of endings.

Mark and Helly are running. Not running anywhere in particular, not running towards or away from anyone or anything, just running. The camera follows them down the labyrinthine halls of Lumon’s severed floor, with handheld jitters that contrast the sharp, robotically programs swings it made to capture Mark’s season-opening mad dash. Hand in hand, they turn corner after corner. The red emergency lights slither through the hallways, reminding them that they cannot run forever. Eventually, someone will catch up with them, and they will have to face consequences for their choices. They keep running. They move down one corridor, straight towards us, and mid-stride the image freezes. We zoom into their faces, their eyes set somewhere further down this endless maze of white hallways. What do we see there? Fear? Defiance? Relief? All three? We fade to a solid red, and the credits roll. Severance will eventually return for a third season, and when it does we will see what happens to Mark and Helly, what becomes of the bizarre love hexagon that they have tangled themselves in, and of Dylan and Irving and all the other characters left in precarious positions. But for the next couple years, Mark and Helly will still be running.

Severance ending its second season on a freeze frame is a notable decision largely because the practice has fallen out of style in the last few decades. The common conception of a freeze frame ending today identifies it with something like “Hey, Scotty. Jesus, man!”, but the practice has a proud history from the French New Wave to some of the most popular American films of the ‘70s and ‘80s. George Lucas once remarked that the only parts of a movie that really matter are the first five minutes and the last twenty. The freeze frame ending takes this idea even further, giving outsized importance to a film’s very last moment, stamping it definitively as the image we are meant to take away from the film. It is true with any film that the story ends with its final shot, and nothing further occurs beyond that point, but most films try to disguise this, inviting us to imagine that its world keeps turning and its characters have lives that extend beyond its reels. Freeze frame endings instead make a point of stopping time at story’s end, emphasizing that we will go no further. The moment the film chooses to freeze on becomes then the moment its world and characters are stuck in for eternity. The nature of that moment, then, becomes a final, irreversible verdict, a state we remain in for all time.

There are two main paths films tend to take when deciding on this critical moment in which its world will forever stay. One is to pick a moment with a clear emotional signature in order to heighten that emotion and make it stick. Usually, that emotion is triumph. Films that deliver us a happy ending often freeze on a celebration of that happiness, cementing themselves as fables, fairy tales where our heroes live happily ever after and we do not have to worry about any of the real life problems that might arise after this moment of joy. This is the style that gives us those lovely cheesy ‘80s endings, but it has been done well plenty of times too. Maybe the most effective instance comes in Rocky, the film that made happy endings cool again after New Hollywood abandoned them. We freeze on an image of Rocky embracing Adrian, having found love, gone the distance against Apollo Creed, and proven himself a legitimate fighter. We find the quintessential ‘80s happy ending freeze frame in films like The Karate Kid, on a shot of Mr. Miyagi smiling and nodding in approval to Daniel after he wins the climactic tournament, and The Breakfast Club, with Bender’s famous fist-pump. More recently, we see the technique used in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, as Harry finally experiences a moment of freedom and joy with his new Firebolt broomstick.

There is a very clever use of a happy ending freeze frame in Run Lola Run, ending on Lola grinning to her boyfriend as he asks about the contents of her bag, which contains more than 100,000 marks they are now free to keep for themselves. It is a wonderful moment on which to end, but the freeze frame is also a perfect thematic choice for this film in particular. Twice in the film Lola has rewound time to give herself another shot at saving her boyfriend, and now, having reached the timeline where everything works out, time freezes at her moment of triumph, allowing her to revel in it forever.

The emotion a film chooses to heighten with its final freeze frame does not have to be joy, of course. Freeze frames can also be effective ending a film in the opposite direction. As a counter to Rocky, a different Sylvester Stallone film, First Blood, uses its final freeze frame to emphasize tragedy, as a broken, traumatized Rambo stares helplessly at the army of police officers arresting him who see him as a monster. The brilliantly-titled Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia freezes on the smoking barrel of the gun that has just killed our main character, highlighting the endless cycle of violence and cruelty that defines its neo-noir world.

The other path freeze frame endings commonly take is one that mires us in uncertainty. Instead of definitively locking us into victory or defeat, these films close on a moment of tenuousness, one where nothing is certain and we are made to wrestle with confusion and doubt. This tenuousness is achieved rather literally in the three consecutive freeze frames that end Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The film ends as one character leans over the railing of a bridge reaching for a pair of shotguns he aims to drop into the Thames to destroy criminal evidence, while his allies frantically call him to tell him the guns are worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. The freeze frames occur as Tom’s cell phone goes off in his mouth while he stretches out to the guns, ending the film right at its highest point of tension.

More frequently, though, this uncertainty is less literal, the film presenting us an enigma in its frozen image we can chew on as we leave the theater. A common subject of these enigmatic freeze frame endings is the human face, as occurs with perhaps the most iconic freeze frame ending, and the one that probably most inspired Severance’s: The 400 Blows. Like Severance, the film’s final scene focuses on running, as Antoine, who has struggled to find a home anywhere throughout the film, escapes his detention facility and just keeps running until he reaches the beach and the sea. He runs to the water, briefly splashes around, then turns around, with the film freezing as his eyes meet the camera for a split-second and zooming in on his face. Even with his face frozen and blown up, it is difficult to tell what it betrays. He seems proud but also afraid, alone and unsure of what comes next. As he gazes into the camera, he seems to be reaching out to the audience, asking us for help after all the adults in his life failed to give him any. But we have little to offer him, and it is on that expression of freedom, desperation, fear, and who knows what else all mixed together on a boy’s inscrutable face that the film ends.

Other films have followed The 400 Blows’ lead in ending on a freeze frame of an uncertain face. Three Days of the Condor injects the into its final freeze frame the paranoia of ‘70s political thrillers, as in a long-lensed shot we spy our hero Joe Turner’s face amidst the crowd of a New York street, forever looking over his shoulder for the next agent sent to kill him, plagued by the doubt Agent Higgins has just planted in him that The New York Times will even print his story. Abbas Kiarostami’s beautiful film Close-Up ends on a freeze frame shot of the kind its title suggests, depicting its main character Hossein Sabzian with his own indecipherable expression. Sabzian has spent the film impersonating the famous director Mohsen Makhmalbaf to a wealthy family, and at the end finds himself facing that family again as a guest alongside the real Makhmalbaf. It is now the moment for him to act plainly as himself, and as the film freezes on his face it invites us to ponder who this true Sabzian might be.

The most interesting freeze frame endings, though, might be the ones that combine these two strategies, keeping us in a moment with a clear emotion while hinting at the uncertainties that lie beneath. One such ending is that of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, famously ending on an image of Butch and Sundance rushing out guns blazing into an army raining bullets upon them. We do not see the pair get shot down, instead staying on the frozen image of the two of them in their heroic poses, the grand epitome of wild west outlaws. But we hear all the guns firing at them, again and again. The film leaves it no mystery what happens to Butch and Sundance, but rather than subjecting us to their violent downfall, it ends showing them in all their glory.

Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money uses a similar strategy in its ending freeze frame. Whatever the outcome of Eddie and Vincent’s game, the writing is on the wall for Eddie. He is past his prime, Vincent will eventually beat him, and Eddie will become irrelevant again. But the film does not go on long enough to show us this, instead choosing to freeze on Eddie’s face at the start of his match with Vincent as he breaks, triumphantly declaring “I’m back!,” the thrill of the game on his face again. We know that Eddie is a losing bet going forward, but in the film’s eyes, he is forever in this moment, on top of the world.

Then there is 2020’s Another Round, which ends with an outburst of joy as Mads Mikkelsen’s character Martin dances and drinks with his friends and newly-graduated students, the film freezing with Martin midair diving into the Copenhagen harbor. It is a moment of pure ecstasy, but one with concerning undertones as Martin dives headfirst back into the practice of heavy drinking that has destroyed his life during the film. Yet the film quashes these concerns as it ends, keeping its focus on Martin’s exuberance, freezing on him flying high, before he crashes down into the cold water.

From François Truffaut to Martin Scorsese, from American sports classics to experimental Iranian documentaries, the freeze frame has long been a powerful way to add some extra punch to the end of a film, using the temporal equivalent of an extreme close-up to extend its final moment into an eternity. Such a technique can be used to heighten a film’s final emotional beats or cast doubt on any potential conclusions we might draw. Since their heyday in the 1970s and ‘80s freeze frames have turned into an antiquated way to end a film, but perhaps the ending of Severance’s latest season can compel more filmmakers to consider the technique seriously and craft final images for their films that might stick around forever.

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