How ‘Ozark’ Cinematography Put a ‘Sense of Danger in the Shadows’ for Season 4

variety.com:

Catherine Springer “Ozark” cinematographer Shawn Kim came aboard the show at the start of Season 4 with a good idea of what creators Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams wanted for the look of the dark thriller about a mob accountant and his family who relocate from Chicago to the Missouri Ozarks: A “sense of danger in the shadows,” Kim says.“Ozark” fans have been waiting three months for the second half of the season to find out what happens to the Byrdes — Jason Bateman’s Marty, wife Wendy (Laura Linney) and their two children — as they try to wriggle free from the clutches of the drug cartel that employs him and the FBI that wants to imprison him.

But Kim says the final seven installments, which drops April 29 and close out the Netflix series, are built around the ambitious Ruth (Julia Garner), who had worked for Marty and saw her world collapse around her at the end of the first half of the season.

For instance, in the new batch of episodes, a high-angle shot — “something we almost never do on Ozark” — uses a diopter filter to create a minimal depth of field. “This lets the audience into a more intimate space than they are used to on the show,” Kim says, capturing the sense that something is “fundamentally starting to take hold in Ruth’s character.” They used a 30-degree tilt to kill out any background, “just focused on three eyelashes.

I know we had a hypercritical field of focus before, but we really took it down, to, like, an F1, P-stop of 1, wide open, middle of the day.