In this small masterpiece from director Francis Ford Coppola, Gene Hackman gives a superb performance as the lonely surveillance expert tracking the movements and voices of Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams, only to find that the marital infidelity he supposes he is observing could be part of a murder plot. Coppola tweaks the idea to surreal effect, while editor Walter Murch orchestrates the eavesdropping to produce a uniquely baffling wall of sound. Made two years after Coppola's The Godfather, this haunting thriller skilfully taps into post-Watergate paranoia resulting in an intensely fascinating study of a perpetrator turned victim of the surveillance society.

A paranoid, secretive surveillance expert has a crisis of conscience when he suspects that the couple he is spying on will be murdered.