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Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
From Three Days of the Condor to The Parallax View, paranoid thrillers of the 1970s love a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top.
Yet the powerful disquiet of Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake lies in how its conspiracy begins on molecular and municipal levels: spores, raindrops, flower buds, garbage trucks mysteriously filled with hair, a nervous dry cleaner who claims his wife is now devoid of personality or emotion, despite her identical appearance.
Kaufman and cinematographer Michael Chapman (Taxi Driver, The Last Detail) make a visual meal of the paranoia, letting the camera peek around corners or affixing it to a park swing to create a sudden moment of alien nausea.
Tracking the body-snatching trend is an ensemble that includes Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright and Leonard Nimoy. The characters are fairly ordinary San Franciscans—a health inspector, a lab tech, a bathhouse operator—but the way Kaufman’s film deals with emotion or lack of it feels like a warning to unremarkable people.
All our petty anxieties (Goldblum’s abound), unspoken crushes (like the one between Sutherland’s and Adams’ characters), the lives we’ve been deferring…are they actually all that make us human? Cinema 21, Jan. 20.
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