Blow Out (1981)
Nobody has ever worn their Hitchcock influence quite as proudly, or as quite as well, as Brian De Palma, and Blow Out is one of the films that earns him the comparison outright. He is one of my favourite directors, full stop, so I came to this already predisposed to enjoy it. I am very happy to report it more than held up.
The set-up is a beauty. John Travolta plays Jack, a movie sound man who, out recording effects one night, captures the audio of a car going off a bridge and slowly becomes convinced that what everyone is calling a blowout was in fact a gunshot. From that one ingenious hook De Palma spins a paranoid murder mystery about a man who can hear the truth long before anybody will believe him. It is the kind of premise that sounds almost too neat when you describe it in a sentence, and then you watch the film and realise it genuinely is that good.
The craft on show is the real star here. De Palma builds the entire film around sound, a lovely bit of wit given his hero's trade, and the set-pieces are extraordinary. The layering of audio, the split-screen compositions, the swooning Pino Donaggio score, these are the work of a film-maker in total command of his toolkit. There is a real Hitchcockian elegance to the way he tightens the screws, and watching it I kept thinking of Dial M for Murder, another immaculately engineered thriller, in how each turn is set up and sprung with almost mathematical precision. This is old-fashioned suspense, made modern, and it is thrilling to watch.
The performances hold their end up nicely too. This is early Travolta, before the wilderness years and the remarkable comeback that followed, and he makes a steady, sympathetic anchor. You believe completely in this decent man who finds himself in well over his head. Nancy Allen, playing the woman swept up alongside him, is working with a character written to grate a little, but that is the part doing its job rather than the actress falling short. She carries it off just fine, and the two of them have a natural, easy chemistry that keeps you on their side even as the walls close in.
If you have already spent time with De Palma's earlier work, say Sisters or Carrie, you will recognise the obsessions at play here: voyeurism, the unreliable witness, the machinery of suspense pushed until it almost becomes its own subject. Blow Out feels like the fullest expression of all of that, a film where every stylistic choice is doing genuine narrative work rather than just showing off. Which, to be fair to De Palma, is always the accusation and rarely the reality.
I had a fine time with the whole thing. The story grips, the mystery pays off, and it closes on a sting I would not dream of spoiling here. If anything, Blow Out simply reaffirms what I already believed: that De Palma belongs in the front rank of American directors, right alongside the films that made me a devotee in the first place. This is another for that shelf, and fresh proof that when he is on song, precious few do slippery, stylish suspense any better.
Four stars.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 1981 | Watched: 2026-08-17
Where to watch
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