Well this clip may as well have been silent because I obviously didn’t understand anything that was said (I took Spanish as my foreign language). I guess voice inflections kind of tell us a little bit but I really didn’t understand a whole lot. Anyway here is what I saw:

The kids are playing a game that the lady up on the balcony (I assume she is a mom) does not want them to play. They stop until she goes inside and then they continue playing. To me this shows me that they don’t listen and that is foreshadowing for something that will likely happen later on in the  movie.

You know that one lady is pregnant before you even see her belly because of the way she struggles getting up the stairs. I am not sure of  her role in this scene but she may be important later on in the movie.

The little girl almost gets hit by a car which to me was foreshadowing that something bad would happen. It could also be seen as her staying out of trouble but that is not how I saw it.

Then you see the lady setting the table for two right after the little girl almost gets hit by a car–to me that showed me that maybe the little girl wouldn’t end up making it home. And then when you see the shadow looking at the little girl you know that she won’t come home. I am sure that sign was some kind of wanted sign for that guy and the fact that he had probably abducted other children recently.

The mom is worried that something is wrong because the little girl should be home soon. Then she didn’t show up with the other kids. You then see the little girl getting a ball from the creepy guy. Lang does so many things to make sure that you know that the little girl isn’t going to come home. Then the mom gets her hopes up when the mail man rings the doorbell, but you know that it is in vain. She looks down the stairs and calls the girl’s name, looks at the clock again, calls out the window to her and gets more and more frantic. The camera shows all of the places that she isn’t and then finally her ball rolling away.

It is crazy to me that you don’t have to know German to understand what is going on and what has gone on that hasn’t been explicitly shown on the screen.