Please note: This was screened in July 2023
Partly inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, Francis Ford Coppola’s immaculate thriller about a surveillance expert who gets drawn into the devious lives of those he eavesdrops on is a masterful study of paranoia and loneliness.
Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a San Francisco surveillance expert – a solitary, guilt-ridden and intensely private man devoted to anonymity and ethical neutrality, who goes about his work with a cold professional distance. When he's drawn into a murder plot and corporate conspiracy, Caul finds himself tormented by echoes of his past, which forces him to engage with the moral implications of his work.
Released in the same year of the revelation of the Watergate scandal, Coppola’s film is a stone cold classic political thriller that perfectly encapsulates the disaffection and paranoia of 1970s America.