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name: film-companion description: Provides pre- and post-viewing context for a specific film to make it more rewarding to watch. Pre-viewing mode primes attention without spoilers — why the film matters, its moment in cinema history, what to watch for, and the right frame of mind to bring. Post-viewing mode enriches after viewing — what the viewer likely missed, what contemporary audiences experienced that modern viewers don't, production backstory, and the critical debates worth knowing. Strictly no spoilers in pre-viewing mode. Do NOT use for film reviews, recommendation lists ("what should I watch"), standalone plot summaries, or post-viewing group discussion agendas (use podcast-book-club / discussion-agenda for those). when_to_use: Use whenever the user asks for context on a film they are about to watch or have just finished. Trigger phrases include "about to watch [film]," "context for [film]," "what should I know before/after watching [film]," "help me appreciate [film]," "what did I miss in [film]," "spoilers are fine, tell me about [film]." Infer pre- vs post-viewing from the user's phrasing; ask only if genuinely ambiguous. allowed-tools:

• WebSearch
• WebFetch

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Film Companion

What this skill produces

Context that makes a single specified film more rewarding to watch. It runs in one of two modes, and the mode determines almost everything:

• Pre-viewing — the viewer has not seen the film. The job is to prime attention and set the right frame of mind, with zero spoilers. Why the film is worth their time, the historical/medium moment it occupies, what to watch for, and how to meet it.
• Post-viewing — the viewer has just finished. The job is enrichment: what they likely missed, what audiences of the era experienced that they don't, production backstory, the meaning of specific choices, and the critical debates. Full spoilers are fine and expected.

A worked example of each mode is in examples/. Read the relevant one before drafting — they set the bar for tone, depth, and prose texture. Match them.

Step one: determine the mode

Infer from the user's phrasing first. "About to watch," "before I watch," "haven't seen it yet" → pre-viewing. "Just finished," "just watched," "what did I miss," "spoilers are okay" → post-viewing.

Ask only if genuinely ambiguous (e.g., a bare "tell me about Vertigo"). One short question, then proceed. Do not ask if the phrasing already answers it — being asked the obvious is annoying.

If the user moves from pre to post in the same conversation (watches the film, comes back), switch modes cleanly. The post-viewing pass should not merely repeat the pre-viewing material with spoilers added; it should go where the no-spoilers rule previously forbade.

The hardest constraint: no spoilers in pre-viewing mode

In pre-viewing mode this is a hard line, not a preference. Never reveal:

• How the plot resolves, or any third-act turn
• Character fates — who dies, betrays, is revealed to be whom
• Twists, reversals, or the meaning of an ending
• Whether the ending is happy, tragic, or ambiguous

Describe premise, texture, form, and reputation, never outcome. The most spoiler-prone moves are "why it's worth watching" (tempting to praise the ending) and "what to watch for" (tempting to point at a setup whose payoff is the twist). When in doubt, cut.

A spoiler smuggled into a pre-viewing companion poisons the whole document. Treat one leaked reveal as a failure of the entire piece.

Research before writing — do not trust recall

This is where a film companion lives or dies. Recall is dense for canonical films and dangerously thin for everything else — recent releases, foreign-language films, genre and cult titles, anything obscure. Confabulated production trivia is the characteristic failure mode. If a specific claim isn't something you're confident of, search for it or omit it. Never invent.

Verify with web search (and cite with standard citation tags for facts pulled from results):

• Release date(s), country of origin, original language, runtime
• Director, key cast, cinematographer, composer, and other relevant craft credits
• Production history: budget, studio, shoot conditions, troubled-production facts, what was novel technically
• Critical reception then and now; major awards; box-office outcome
• The director's filmography and where this film sits in it
• Any "famous fact" before repeating it — film history is full of compounded myths (apocryphal on-set stories, misattributed innovations, invented budgets)

Calibrate depth to the film. A heavily-documented classic needs verification of load-bearing specifics; an obscure film needs more searching, not less, because recall is weakest exactly where confidence feels fine.

The lenses (not a fixed template)

Unlike a book companion's fixed sections, a film companion selects from a menu of lenses and uses only those that fit the film. Forcing every lens onto every film produces the generic film-Wikipedia slop this skill exists to avoid. Choose the three-to-six lenses that actually illuminate this film, and structure the piece around them.

Each lens below notes when it fires and which mode(s) it serves.

• Medium-moment context — where the film sits in cinema's own history: a technical or formal turning point (silent-to-sound, the arrival of color, the collapse of the Production Code, the New Hollywood break, the digital transition), a movement (German Expressionism, Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, Dogme 95). Strongest for films that sit on or near a hinge. Both modes.

• The temporal gap — what audiences of the era experienced that you don't — the signature lens. What a contemporary audience knew, expected, feared, or took for granted that a modern viewer has to reconstruct: censorship context, technical novelty that's now invisible, political mood, star personas, genre conventions then in force. This lens scales with the age of the film — compute the gap between release and now and weight it accordingly. Near-meaningless for a film from the last few years; central for anything pre-1970. Primarily post-viewing; a no-spoiler version can prime pre-viewing.

• Production backstory — how the film got made, when that bears on what's on screen: budget battles, casting accidents, technical invention, a director's working method, a famously troubled or famously charmed shoot. Include only when it changes how the viewer sees the result. Primarily post-viewing.

• Technical and formal craft — what to actually attend to: camerawork, editing rhythm, sound design, score, production design, performance style. In pre-viewing this is "watch for X"; in post-viewing it's "here's how they did the thing you just saw, and why it was hard." Both modes.

• Auteur / director context — the director's preoccupations, signature techniques, and where this film falls in their arc; recurring collaborators. Useful for situating a film as part of a body of work. Both modes.

• Genre conventions in play — what genre machinery the film is using, subverting, or inventing, and what the audience of the time would have expected from it. Both modes.

• Frame of mind / viewing register — what kind of object this is and how to meet it: a fable to be taken symbolically rather than literally, a slow film that rewards patience over plot, a film whose pleasures are formal rather than narrative. This lens prevents a viewer from rejecting a film for the wrong reasons. High-value and easy to omit — include it whenever the film asks to be watched in a non-obvious way. Primarily pre-viewing, but post-viewing can use it to reframe a viewer's dissatisfaction.

• Contested ground / critical debates — the legitimate critiques and live arguments: dated politics, a morally uncomfortable structure, an overrated reputation, a famous dissent. Honesty here is mandatory (see Tone). Primarily post-viewing.

• Which version, and where to watch it — for many films, especially older ones, the cut and the transfer matter as much as the title. Identify the version worth seeking — the definitive restoration (Criterion, the BFI, Janus, a studio 4K), the correct cut where multiple exist (theatrical vs. director's vs. extended), the right aspect ratio and frame rate, and whether the original score or a notable reconstruction is attached. Then say where it can actually be found right now — streaming service, physical media, rental, archive. Availability is volatile and recall is worthless for it; this lens requires a fresh web search every time, and the "where" should be presented as current-as-of-today, not asserted from memory. Where the user's country matters for availability, use their location if known or note that links are region-dependent. For a recent film still in theaters or with an obvious single release, keep this brief. Pre-viewing (it's a what-to-do-now lens); usually placed early so the viewer can act on it.

• What to watch next — a short, curated onward path: the director's adjacent work, films in conversation with this one. Two to four titles with a reason each, never a dump. Either mode; usually a closing note.

Output format

Deliver the companion inline in the conversation — never as a file. This is a read-once-and-watch experience, not a saved artifact: the viewer wants to read it in the chat and go watch the film, not open and manage a document. Do not write the output to a file, do not use file-creation or present-files machinery, do not offer a download. Just respond in the chat. (The examples/ files are calibration references for this skill, not a model for how to deliver output — their being files is incidental to their being examples.)

Markdown. Prose with bolded inline headers introducing each movement (as in the worked examples), not heavy ## section machinery — this reads as an informed friend talking, not a reference entry. A single # title line is optional; if used, keep it to the film, year, and director, nothing else.

In pre-viewing mode, follow the title with an At a Glance block — a compact two-column table (no header row) with five fields: Director, Year, Runtime, Original Language, and Content Rating. Runtime should reflect the canonical or recommended cut in minutes; note alternate cuts only if that cut is the one being recommended. For films from the pre-ratings era or films that were never rated, use "Not rated." Verify all five fields via web search — don't guess runtime or rating from memory.

Open by orienting the viewer to the film in a sentence or two, then move through the chosen lenses. Length is a judgment call: enough to be substantive, not so much that it becomes a term paper. The worked examples are the calibration.

Embed media where it earns its place. Use the image_search tool — whose results render inline in the chat, consistent with the inline delivery above — for material that genuinely aids appreciation: a director portrait, a film-movement reference point, a frame illustrating a technique being discussed. Place images next to the text they illustrate, not in a front-loaded block. Skip images entirely rather than padding with decorative stills. Note the content constraints: avoid copyrighted film stills, posters, and character imagery where the search is likely to return protected material; prefer public-domain or clearly licensable sources (older films, director portraits on Wikimedia). When in doubt, describe rather than embed.

Tone and style

• Direct, evidence-based, not reverent. Match the worked examples.
• Willing to say a film is overrated, slow for bad reasons, or morally uncomfortable. A companion that can only praise is worse than none. When citing a critique, attribute it (e.g., feminist readings of a film's gender politics) rather than asserting it as settled.
• Push back on received wisdom and film-history myths when they're wrong. Don't repeat an apocryphal on-set legend as fact to sound knowledgeable.
• No hagiography, no breathless "masterpiece" filler. The viewer is an adult forming their own judgment; give them the materials, not the verdict.
• Use semicolons and em-dashes; the prose should read like good liner notes, not a blog post.

Skipping and discipline

• Use only the lenses that fit. Three sharp lenses beat eight forced ones.
• Never pad a thin film with invented depth. A shorter, accurate companion is better than a bloated one.
• In pre-viewing mode, when a lens can't be discussed without spoiling, either give its no-spoiler version or drop it.
• Compute the temporal gap before leaning on the era lens — don't tell a viewer of a 2024 film "what audiences of the time experienced."

Reference examples

Two worked examples are in examples/, both built on F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927) so the two modes can be compared directly against the same film:

• examples/sunrise-1927-pre-viewing.md — pre-viewing mode. Models the no-spoiler discipline, the medium-moment lens (the silent-to-sound hinge), the frame-of-mind lens ("watch it as a tone poem, not a plot"), what-to-watch-for craft notes, a priming version of the temporal gap — all without revealing a single plot beat — and the which-version-and-where lens with researched, current availability (the surviving-print history and the relevant restoration).

• examples/sunrise-1927-post-viewing.md — post-viewing mode, same film. Models the temporal-gap lens at full strength (what 1927 audiences experienced), production backstory, decoding specific formal choices, the structural read, honest engagement with the film's morally uncomfortable center, attributed critical dissent, and a what-to-watch-next close.

Read the example matching the mode you're in before drafting. Read both if the film is unusual or the mode is ambiguous. Example filenames follow title-slug-year-mode.md; future examples should match.