Filmmakers have plenty of tricks to manipulate a viewer's emotions or mood. Action and dialogue are fine, but they are enhanced by lighting, color, music, sound effects, ands even camera angles. The "Dutch Angle, or a tilted camera, is one of those tricks. People are pretty good at compensating for the angle of our heads, and therefore our line of sight. Most folks have no trouble laying on their side on the couch and watching TV. Our brains know where our heads are. But in a movie, we aren't able to compensate so well, because if our heads are straight up and the vision on the screen is tilted, well, it makes everything appear somewhat wrong. We have lost control of our point of view. And that's naturally unsettling.
Vox takes us through the history of the Dutch Angle and how filmmakers use it to make us feel the way they want us to feel. One of the more extreme uses of the tile came in a scene from the movie Black Panther, which you can see at Kottke.