Sightlines · a viewing thread

The Paranoid and the Obsessed

A run of stylish thrillers about lone men consumed by a hidden pattern, a betrayal, or a truth they can't stop chasing — each staged with more virtuosity than the plot strictly needs.

Mostly film-school canon and cult objects anchored by one true crowd-pleaser; nothing is hard to start, but Pi and Blow Out land hard and Knife in the Water asks for arthouse patience.

• Blow Out (1981)
• Point Blank (1967)
• Pi (1998)
• Mission: Impossible (1996)
• Knife in the Water (1962)
• The Conversation (1974) — The overlooked one that rhymes hardest with Blow Out — Harry Caul obsessively replaying a bugged conversation is the same lonely-craftsman paranoia, and De Palma built Blow Out on this film's bones.
• Seconds (1966) — If Point Blank's cold geometry landed, this is the under-seen Frankenheimer nightmare to finally pull down — an exhausted man remade by a secret corporation, shot in James Wong Howe's wide-angle dread and ending in devastation.
• The Parallax View (1974) — The forgotten Pakula that sits right beside these — a lone reporter chasing an assassination pattern that keeps killing its own witnesses, staged with icy, virtuosic compositions and a gut-punch of an ending.
• I... for Icarus (1979) — The under-seen French one to finally watch if the others hooked you — a lone prosecutor who refuses to sign the tidy lone-gunman verdict and chases the truth into the machine, Montand carrying the same obsessive solitude.