Cate Shortland

The best scene in Black Widow (2021) is two women sitting on the floor of a Budapest flat after trying to kill each other. Shortland stages the fight at close quarters with curtains, a sink and a hob, Gabriel Beristain shoots it hand-held and near enough that we can see both women getting tired, and then it stops and they talk. Florence Pugh's Yelena says the Ohio years were real to her whatever they were to everyone else, and she says it as an accusation. We were caught off guard and moved. That is Shortland's habit: get people exhausted and near the ground, then wait.

She came up through short films and television, including episodes of The Secret Life of Us, and her first feature, Somersault (2004), which she also wrote, was a coming-of-age story built out of close, sensory detail rather than plot. Lore (2012), which she co-wrote, followed children across Germany at the end of the war and trusted silence for long stretches; it is the film most people mean when they say her name. Berlin Syndrome (2017) took the same interest in a young woman under duress into a thriller about captivity. Then Scarlett Johansson asked her to direct a Marvel film.

What she does well has not changed. Her women are flawed and allowed to stay so, and her images work through lighting, colour and a camera that stays on a face rather than through story. She has not kept a cinematographer, working once each with Robert Humphreys and Adam Arkapaw before Beristain, and the look has held anyway. She runs a set built for improvisation. Her own account of Black Widow was this: "What we tried to create on set was a safe space for the actors, so they could give as truthful a performance as they could, and so they could have fun together and do improvisation." You can see the result at the farmhouse table, where four agents who once pretended to be a family bicker like one.

The weakness is the mirror of it. The complaint made against Berlin Syndrome was that the mood and the thriller never quite joined, and against Lore that the pictures could be so absorbing the horror behind them went soft. Black Widow has the trouble the other way round. The director of the Budapest floor is present for perhaps a third of it, and the villain at a desk and the last half hour could be anyone's. We scored it 63, and most of those points belong to Pugh and the kitchen.

Since then she has gone back to television, on Three Women (2023) and The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox (2025), which may be the right size for her. The evidence so far is that the closer the camera and the smaller the space, the better she gets. Marvel gave her the biggest set in the business and she did her best work in its kitchen.