So this is conceptually an interesting movie, because it’s a kind of spiritual revisiting of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, a 1966 British movie about a guy who unwittingly photographs a murder. But it’s made in 1981, set in Philadelphia[1], and the protagonist unwittingly records the audio of a murder. Also, where Antonioni’s movie barely gave a shit about the plot, this one is very plot-forward.

But there are two big things that the movies have in common.

First, there’s a lot in them about the process of the physical media. In Blow-Up, there was a whole extended bit about, well, blowing up a photo. Here, we watch Travolta doing some audio mixing with tape reels in a way that seems wildly implausible; we get a scene where he’s converting still photos into a motion picture; there’s a film lab where he needs his film rush-developed. These sequences were probably notable at the time, but to us moderns who are used to doing everything digitally, they’re fascinating.

Second, there’s a lot of nudity. The movie actually opens in a clever way that makes you think you’re seeing the murder, but also that the movie is incredibly sexploitationy — but it turns out that actually, this is a movie-within-a-movie, and the protagonist (John Travolta) is an audio mixer on this co-ed dorm slasher film. With that established, we then follow him out to a park at night-time, where he goes to record some ambient background sounds and unwittingly records someone shooting the tire out of a car being driven by a prominent politician (whose subsequent fatal crash is otherwise being dismissed as an accident, rather than a murder).

The movie is full of a zillion plot twists and turns, which I won’t go into here, but a notable thing is that the movie doesn’t stay with Travolta (or the woman he’s working with, who was an eyewitness to the murder) — it spends time giving us the villain’s perspective, including some phone conversations with a sinister John Lithgow where motivations and detailed explanations are helpfully spelled out for the viewer.

This is pretty critical, because a thing that elevates this movie is that…

Spoilers

…Travolta does not solve the murder. He has clear proof that a murder occurred, but the bad guys successfully destroy the evidence. And, worse: they kill his partner while she’s wearing a wire that he’s listening to, as he’s trying vainly to rescue her. He does kill Lithgow after that murder, but… that’s revenge, not justice. The general public continues to view the murder as a weird accident, the other conspirators get away clean, and the woman is dead and he’s the one who talked her into wearing that wire, so it’s kinda his fault.

The last scene of the movie is a broken, tortured Travolta continuing to make his schlock film. And it’s got one of those conceits that makes thematic, but not literal, sense: He’s using the dying scream of that woman, recorded from her wire, as a dubbing scream in the slasher movie he’s the sound guy for. It’s the kind of detail that could seem cheesy and over-the-top contrived if it hit wrong, but it worked for me.

Beyond the plot, the movie is shot in a way that feels effectively conspiratorial, with its split screens and night-time scenes. It also captures the feeling of the city in that period, and some bicentennial Americana, in a way that reminded me a bit of Nashville.

So the befuddling comparison that comes to mind for me after watching this is Raising Cain, which is also directed by De Palma, also has John Lithgow in it, and has some similarities in having an overstuffed and twisty plot that may not, strictly speaking, fully make sense. And yet… somehow, Raising Cain was absolutely awful, whereas this is pretty good. You can see how they’re both movies by the same guy, but the one of them is just much, much better. Like, even from an acting perspective: Lithgow is kind of low-key sinister here, and a hammy clown in Cain. But this movie is like a decade before that one, so you’d think that if anything, everyone would be better at their jobs, right?

Idk, I don’t feel like I really understand De Palma’s whole vibe. But whatever you think of his whole oeuvre, this is a solid thriller. Recommended.

  1. It took me way too long to establish that it was actually Philadelphia. Like, they mentioned the Liberty Bell early, but then there were scenes of run-down porn theatres that I thought were supposed to be NYC, and then they go to a subway and the station is labelled “Newark,” which threw me into wondering if it was in fact Newark. But yeah: it was Philly all along. ↩︎