The Parallax View

The middle film of Alan J. Pakula's paranoia trilogy, between Klute and All the President's Men. Gordon Willis shot all three, which is where the layered use of darkness comes from; there is a persistent sense that someone is standing in the shadow of the frame. After a presidential candidate is assassinated, the reporter Joe Frady, who witnessed it, begins to suspect a company called Parallax. He comes to believe the firm is a school that trains directionless sociopaths as killers, and decides to infiltrate it. The film's most famous passage is the sequence in which Frady watches the company's test film. Images of family, country, love and violence accelerate into each other; the montage is hypnotic and disturbing at once, and nothing is explained. It was made after the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations and immediately before Watergate. Who it is for: viewers who like 1970s political conspiracy thrillers and endings that offer no comfort. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a clear answer. The film deliberately leaves the investigation unfinished and ends in despair.