Critics reviews

Part of what makes “Blow Out” quintessential De Palma is that it wears its influences proudly — but also recombines them to make them fully the director’s own.

The tides of auteurist reputation seem to be turning away from BLOW OUT and toward CARLITO'S WAY as De Palma's finest achievement. Not, as they say, that there's anything wrong with that; CARLITO is an undersung triumph and is held in special esteem by the director himself. But BLOW OUT remains De Palma's signature moment, the nexus of so many strains of his directorial temperament.

When Travolta synchs his sound recording with newspaper photos of the car accident to create his own Zapruder film, the moment plays as much as a celebration of the power of cinema as it is a reveal of a vile conspiracy. Yet the film's heady ambitions remain grounded by its bleak setting. Philadelphia, De Palma's hometown, provides a grungy backdrop for the director's hypnotic split diopter shots.

in retrospect, it feels more of a great transition than a truly great film, an autodidactic lesson that allowed De Palma to emerge later on with both the almost unbearable gravity of Casualties of War and the clarified excitement of Femme Fatale, but which in itself only becomes interesting when one looks at its role in reshaping De Palma's career.

It's no fairer to bury the whole of a director's oeuvre under the weight of his accumulated baggage than it is to elevate it on his featherweight virtues. Though liberally afflicted with many of his regrettable habits, Blow Out is an exemplar of De Palma at his best: a competent narrative structure tight enough to keep the film on the rails while providing enough room for him to perform his tin pan visual arias.

The closing images and sounds of Blow Out are horrible and definitive, and, with due respect to Antonioni, much more terrifying than the existential what-if miming that closes Blow-Up. De Palma wants to penetrate and shatter; with perhaps the exception of Carrie and Casualties of War, never have De Palma's characters felt so vivid, dynamic, and therefore, cruelly snuffed out.

Blow Out is not known as one of Brian De Palma's horror movies, but of all his films, it's the one that feels most like a nightmare. Carrie and The Fury ended with orgasms—frustrated teenagers revenging their oppressors in phantasmagoric releases of pent-up sexual energy. This espionage thriller goes out quietly, with a slow-motion dwindle into personal and political hell. By the end, the viewer half expects to wake up sweating, as if from some terrible dream.

This 1981 release is one of Brian De Palma's more interesting and better-made thrillers, though it's even more abjectly derivative than his Hitchcock imitations (borrowing mightily this time from Antonioni'sBlowup, as the title suggests).