Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Death Watch (1980)

Contemporary Films (UK)
Directed by Bertrand Tavernier
My rating: 2.5 stars out of 4
IMDb
(Showtime Beyond)

Murky story set in the near-future about a dying woman's last weeks shown on television as entertainment. Harvey Keitel is miscast as a man with a camera in his brain which broadcasts everything he sees back to a control room overseen by producer Harry Dean Stanton. Keitel befriends the woman (Romy Schneider) in a homeless shelter after she flees the unwanted media attention, unaware he is actually the source of the TV show. They wander around a bleak Scottish countryside, eventually ending up at the seaside home of her former husband (Max von Sydow) where a few plot twists await, none of them interesting or unexpected. Despite predating reality television by nearly two decades, it is an effective, if obvious, critique.

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