10 great films about surveillance

Watching, listening, paying close attention to detail, stitching together fragments of information to create a narrative whole – there’s a certain harmony between the art of surveillance and the act of watching a movie. Cinema itself is inherently voyeuristic, and the best films about surveillance have the potential to capture the Platonic ideal of pure cinema. “You have an immobilised man looking out, that’s one part of the film,” said Alfred Hitchcock to François Truffaut about Rear Window (1954). “The second part shows what he sees and the third part shows how he reacts. This is actually the purest expression of the cinematic idea.”

Of course, away from theoretical applications of cinematic technique, real-world surveillance is usually more insidious in its function. Many of the films below interrogate the nefarious use of surveillance tools by bad actors – whether they be individuals or the state. From detectives on days-long stakeouts with little more than a pair of binoculars for company to the most high-tech, all-seeing apparatus, the films on our list explore the myriad means of covert monitoring.

Director: Yoshitaro Nomura

Rather than kicking off our list of surveillance greats in the most obvious place – with Rear Window (1954) – here’s a lesser-known joint from Japan: one of the earliest pictures to be inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s voyeurist classic.

In the sweltering heat of summer, two Tokyo detectives travel by train to Kyushu, the most southerly of Japan’s main islands. Posing as salesmen, they set up shop in an inn opposite a suburban home, hoping that the man suspected of a pawnshop murder will pay a visit to his former lover, now a housewife. Notably, said housewife is played by Hideko Takamine, erstwhile favourite of director Mikio Naruse and the biggest star in Japanese cinema at the time. 

With very little dialogue, Takamine goes about her chores – cleaning the yard, preparing food – as the cops look on. Yoshitaro fixes in on quotidian details, anatomising the financial realities of the inn and the economic hardship of a post-war homemaker. When the crook turns up, the steady tailing operations to the market and back explode into a high-powered cross-country foot chase. Capturing their man, the cops are left to ruminate on the enigmatic Takamine’s lot in life: “She’ll hide her true passionate self, and become a boring housewife who sews.”

Director: Fritz Lang

Industrial sabotage and political assassinations are confounding the authorities. Mars is in the house of death, and a familiar name has risen from the ashes of history. “Gentlemen, does the name Dr Mabuse mean anything to you?” asks a police inspector. “A criminal genius, he wanted to shock the world with terrorist acts, undermining governments and establishing a fantastic reign of crime… He ended up in an insane asylum where he wrote a kind of last will and instructions for the crimes he was planning. In 1932, he died insane.”

Someone is imitating the nefarious mastermind in Fritz Lang’s final film, the third in a trilogy that began with Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922) and continued with The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933). The setting is a hotel covered with security cameras, two-way mirrors, secret passages and soundproof bunkers – the perfect lair for a master of malevolence and surveillance. Lang transforms Mabuse the man into an inextinguishable idea, fashioning the ultimate late-style B-movie. Mabuse may be dead, but what he represents remains very much alive. Not for nothing is “the whole Nazi nightmare” mentioned explicitly in Lang’s final warning against post-war complacency.

Director: Karel Kachyna

A middle-aged couple in a toxic marriage engage in a vicious battle of one-upmanship. But Virginia Woolf is the last person they need to be afraid of as they hurl insults at each other in this nightmarish wonder from Czech filmmaker Karel Kachyna. Shot in 1969 (with Soviet tanks already on the streets of Prague), completed in 1970, but denied its first public screening for another 20 years, The Ear was one the few films of its era to deal with the realities of totalitarianism directly.

Returning home from a party to find a suspicious car parked outside and their house bugged to the rafters, the duo reflect back on the night’s proceedings in a bid to work out what has provoked the ire of the secret police. With the power cut, candles are lit, as Kachyna strikes a potent balance between pitch-black domestic comedy and noir-ish psychosis. Shooting conversations at the party in the first-person – potential accusers stare directly into camera – Kachyna fashions an expressionistic bacchanal out of paranoia and fear. That the protagonists are not dissidents but fully-fledged members of the party apparatus underlines the film’s terrifying central theme – that no one is safe from the insidious gaze of the state.

Director: Sidney Lumet

Sean Connery is watching Sean Connery on TV. He’s a master safecracker, about to be released from the joint after 10 years. He’s in his last group-therapy session, watching a video of himself talking about his way with a safe. As he exits, a free man, director Sidney Lumet picks out the security cameras watching him leave. Someone is always watching in The Anderson Tapes, one of the earliest in the 1970s wave of conspiracy thrillers.

Connery’s Anderson is setting up one last job, a multi-room heist of a fancy apartment complex. The cops are already on to him, staking out his old haunts and installing wire taps left, right and centre. In this first in Lumet’s run of great New York movies, much of the action is captured and presented through surveillance apparatus – audio recordings, lip readings, 16mm stakeout footage. It all makes for a prescient look at an American surveillance state in the making, while Quincy Jones’ synth score – and Christopher Walken in his first big-screen role – adds some pep to Connery’s caper antics.

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (2024) may have been decades in the making, but if Sam Wasson’s recent biography of the filmmaker is anything to go by, the roots of his paranoid neo-noir The Conversation go back further still. “He would go into the basement as often as he could, building and wiring,” writes Wasson of the pre-teen Coppola, “then he would bug the house.” His parents “didn’t know that he would hide little microphones in every radiator in every room […] Surveillance and communication – that’s how we would have his revenge on the bullies at school.”

It could be an origin story for Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul, the intensely private wiretap expert at the centre of Coppola’s melancholy masterpiece. Pitched somewhere between Hitchcockian voyeurism and Melvillian isolation, but with a mournful soul entirely its own, The Conversation is the greatest of the 70s conspiracy thrillers. With its jigsaw-puzzle narrative – revolving around a murder that may or may not have taken place – eked from Walter Murch’s extraordinary sound design, it’s a devastating exploration of loneliness, guilt and lost faith.

Director: Brian De Palma

Few filmmakers understand the synergy between cinema and surveillance quite like Brian De Palma. Any number of his films could take a spot on this list. There’s the ‘Peeping Toms’ gameshow which opens Sisters (1972), the time-lapse camera stakeout in Dressed to Kill (1980), the Rear Window-riffing voyeurism of Body Double (1984), or the high-tech espionage shenanigans of Mission: Impossible (1996).

Channelling the enigmatic revelations of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (1966) as much as the bleak paranoia of The Conversation, Blow Out received top marks from De Palma superfan Pauline Kael, who called it his best film. John Travolta is the movie sound engineer capturing an exterior ambience track when he’s witness to a car driving into a lake. Did the tyre burst, or can he hear two shots on his tape, pointing to a political assassination? This being a De Palma picture, form and content are less inseparable than engaged in a metatextual dance. It’s a film of palpable sound and fury that moves inexorably towards the Greek tragedy of its shattering climax and gut-punch of an epilogue.

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Every year, TV newsman John Tanner (Rutger Hauer) attends a reunion with three of his university pals. This time, it’s his turn to host. Trouble is, he’s been collared by John Hurt’s FBI agent, who informs him that his former classmates are all KGB spies intent on “extreme, violent, chaotic, apocalyptic” political change. The plan is to wire the house for video and sound and convince one of them to turn.

Adapted from a Robert Ludlum (The Bourne Identity) potboiler, and the last film directed by the great Sam Peckinpah, The Osterman Weekend was a notoriously troubled production. With the film re-cut without his input, it wasn’t until 2022 that a watchable version of the director’s cut emerged, scanned from Peckinpah’s personal negative. It’s a lot better than its reputation suggests, even if it takes a while to get past the reams of expository set-up. Peckinpah, as ever, has an editor’s eye for a set-piece – a car chase in patented slo-mo; a poolside shootout – but it’s the abundance of screens within screens that turn our perception of the film’s surveilled reality on its head.

Director: Tony Scott

New Orleans. A car ferry is blown up by a lone-wolf terrorist. Denzel Washington’s ATF agent is chasing a cold trail. Until, that is, he’s introduced to a top secret surveillance device that can give a live, triangulated satellite feed of any location exactly four-and-a-half days ago. Washington is in the post-bomb present, looking through a window into the pre-bomb past, albeit a past that is quickly catching up with the catastrophic event.

With two timelines playing out simultaneously, Washington tails the bomber with the aid of a portable headset, leading to one of the most extraordinary car chases ever put on film. Washington is driving in the present, chasing a car that only exists in the past. Add to the mix a beautiful victim of the blast with whom Denzel becomes obsessed. To save her, he has to change the past, stepping through the window of the surveillance device. As informed by the American cataclysms of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina as it is by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Déjà Vu is a film soulfully forged from wish-fulfilment fantasy, guilt and regret. Tony Scott’s spatial and temporal orchestrations are little short of jaw-dropping. It’s one of the great studio pictures of this century.

Director: Yau Nai-hoi

“You must remember the details,” says Sergeant Wong (Simon Yam) of the Hong Kong police surveillance unit to his new recruit. The very same wisdom could serve as the mantra for this keen-eyed procedural from director Yau Nai-hoi and producer Johnnie To. The set-up is as no-nonsense as the film’s sub-90-minute running time: an armed gang are hitting jewellery stores across the city; the cops are on to them, instigating a complex tailing operation.

“There are cameras everywhere,” notes the chief villain, codenamed Hollow Man (Tony Leung Ka-fai), urging caution to his team. Yau takes him at his word, setting up a dazzling spectrum of security footage, long-range surveillance shots, snap zooms, and cigarette-packet cameras to capture the action. Cutting on eye-lines and micro-gestures, there isn’t a wasted shot in this stripped-back cat-and-mouse thriller. If the logo of HK production house Milkyway that opens the film isn’t enough to raise your pulse on its own, the promise of Lam Suet as a BBQ-addicted baddie called ‘Fat Man’ ought to do the trick.

Director: Laura Poitras

“Laura, at this stage I can offer nothing more than my word. I am a senior government employee in the intelligence community. I hope you understand that contacting you is extremely high risk … This will not be a waste of your time.” So began the first email to filmmaker Laura Poitras from an anonymous whistleblower in January 2013. Five months later, Poitras met its 29-year-old sender in a Hong Kong hotel, accompanied by journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill. She began recording this documentary as the informant revealed his name to be Edward Snowden.

Over the coming weeks and months, vast swathes of data would be released, detailing the extent of the US and UK’s surveillance of its citizens. On camera, Snowden talks the trio through the files, explaining his motivations. At once an astonishing historical document and a poignant portrait of human vulnerability – Snowden’s description of cutting ties with his partner, friends and family is heartbreaking – Citizenfour plays out like a thriller of the highest stakes. Poitras would win an Oscar, Greenwald a share of the Guardian’s Pulitzer Prize, while Snowden looks set to spend the rest of his life in Russian exile.

The Conversation is back in cinemas, including BFI Southbank, from 5 July 2024.

It comes out in a 4K UHD collector’s edition from StudioCanal on 15 July.