Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
While recording sound effects for a slasher flick, Jack Terry stumbles upon a real-life horror: a car careening off a bridge and into a river. Jack jumps into the water and fishes out Sally from the car, but the other passenger is already dead — a governor intending to run for president. As Jack does some investigating of his tapes, and starts a perilous romance with Sally, he enters a tangled web of conspiracy that might leave him dead.
Brian De Palma's neo-noir thriller is a masterclass in filmmaking craft — Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography is stunning, with split-screens, long takes, and expressive widescreen compositions that rank among the era's best. John Travolta delivers a genuinely grounded, committed performance, and Nancy Allen and John Lithgow add strong support. The film's central conceit — a sound recordist catching a political assassination on tape, riffing on Blow-Up and The Conversation — is executed with a singular, giallo-inflected style that makes it unmistakably De Palma. The ending, while deliberately bleak and emotionally gutting, divides audiences; it's bold but structurally abrupt and leaves some threads feeling unresolved rather than purposefully open. The plot's conspiracy mechanics are serviceable but occasionally muddy, keeping it from the top tier of thriller storytelling.