Excerpt from May 2019 Domino review by Nick Newman, The Film Stage -

So: Domino. The latest from Brian De Palma hits film culture not unlike a moody son trudging to their graduation party at a parent’s behest, a master of big-screen compositions relegated to VOD for those who bother plunking down. That tussle between pedigree of talent and nature of distribution foretells the chaos within: at one moment lit like a Home Depot model living room–a fault I’m more willing to chalk up to incomplete post-production, less likely to blame on Pedro Almodóvar’s longtime DP José Luis Alcaine–the next photographed and cut as if an old pros’ sumptuous fuck-you to pre-vis-heavy and coverage-obsessed action-filmmaking climate, the next maybe just an assembly of whatever master shots the team could scrounge together during those 30 production days. To these eyes it’s a chaotic joy; nearly malicious, deeply serious about the wounds of contemporary terrorism, and smart enough to pull off a mocking of the circumstances around those fighting it.

I have seen Domino twice and express little reservation saying its plot, courtesy of scribe Petter Skavlan, rests somewhere between formalist window dressing and outright catalyst for those plug-and-play habits. Be even a little versed in De Palma and you know what’s to come: God’s-eye (or director’s; same difference) surveillance shots, split screens as an actual plot device, a melodramatic thread over which to lay molasses-thick Pino Donaggio cues treating much of this as a big joke; the plot-setting incident being yet another assault on a stairwell.

Make no mistake, it’s mostly staged for campiness. More often than not that De Palma touch is zooming in on the specter of terrorism until it can find something ridiculous, heightened, thrilling in their possibilities. The rub is that Domino comes into a world with too many scarring reflections of itself to sit right. How amusing that a director so fascinated with the voyeurism-violence dichotomy would make a terrorist thriller about insurgents using the power of propaganda. Its own protagonist (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, carrying a blankness that lets every expression running across his face draw the movie’s emotions in even bigger lines) makes note of their formal sophistication: “even a drone shot!” But the movie’s high-wire act between gawking and actually showing can suddenly yank any fun from our grasp. Safe to say that watching Domino less than a month after the livestreamed Christchurch massacre–among the best warning signs of how deep into horror our world’s being brought–makes for one of De Palma’s few setpieces wherein aesthetic pleasure stings like sin.

Last night, I had the pleasure of experiencing a Brian De Palma double feature at Melbourne’s Astor Theatre, showcasing Body Double and Blow Out. These films—brimming with De Palma’s signature style and thematic preoccupations—offer wildly entertaining exploration of prescient concerns that are strikingly relevant today. During the 80’s, De Palma was evidently fascinated with the elusiveness of truth, the perils of male impotence and sexual obsession, and the corruption and unresponsiveness of official institutions. From our historical vantage point, one can only conclude that the man was onto something.

Body Double screened first. As the reel started to spin, my friend and De Palma aficionado Hamish warned that I was in for something truly strange. The plot centres around Jake Scully (Craig Wasson), a struggling actor who becomes embroiled in a murder mystery after spying on his beautiful neighbour, Gloria Revelle (Deborah Shelton). In this way, Body Double is a vigorously campified update to Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Vertigo, bringing them into an age where cinematic voyeurism and fantasy have become so powerful as to supplant reality. De Palma’s exploration of male leering here is not mere plot device or pastiche. Instead, it forms a configuration of Hollywood filmmaking into the precise shape of the slobbery masculinity it so often serves.

I don’t believe I’ve seen a more pitiable protagonist than Jake Scully, painfully conjured by the boyish Wasson. The character’s apparent ‘soft’ masculinity, true to life, belies something significantly more perverse. Jake’s immotility, both physical and psychological, channels a pusillanimous current within male subjectivity that has increased in deviance since the film’s release. His sheer obsessive fetishism is the very source of his inability to act decisively upon the world, representing the collapse of the ‘performance’ of masculinity under the weight of its own plasticity. He likes to watch—so he may only watch.

The double feature closed with Blow Out, which follows Jack Terry (John Travolta), a movie sound tech who inadvertently records a car accident that turns out to be a political assassination of the likely incoming President. This film is more intensively concerned with the complexities of uncovering the truth, amidst a web of deception and conspiracy, something Body Double approaches rather cartoonishly. De Palma’s focus on the auditory elements—creepily crafted sounds and eerie silences—serves as metaphor for the struggle to make sense of contradictions within reality (something that is once again beginning to prominently concern filmmakers).

Jack is consumed by a need to piece together sounds and images, cross-referenced with his own memories, to reveal the truth. This quest runs up against both institutional indifference and concerted cover-ups. As liberal democracies continue pioneering authoritarian state censorship, too often claiming the freedom of the few driven by their conscience to become whistleblowers, Jack’s total inability to make objective reality count for something feels prophetic. The film’s genuinely bleak and meanspirited conclusion is among the more audacious narrative choices in a career littered with them.

Both Body Double and Blow Out feature ‘strangler’ killers, who target women with the pervasive violence that is often sensationalised—yet inadequately addressed—by the culture industry and society more broadly. The male protagonists, despite their best efforts, are pathetic failures, unable to save the victims or even themselves. In fact, their feebleness and monomania are necessary elements for De Palma’s female characters to become mortally endangered.

De Palma’s films are also deeply reflexive, providing unflinching critique of Hollywood and even independent cinema. Body Double’s Hollywood setting allows De Palma to satirise the industry’s exploitation of sex and violence, while Blow Out examines the manipulative power of film and media in shaping perceptions of reality. Both films underscore how traumatic memories shape people’s present behaviours—the sole reservoir of sympathy De Palma lends to his leading men. All of this amounts to enthralling, splenetic cinema allowing no respite from the litany of social ills which dominate us.

If you haven’t already, submit yourself to these stupefyingly stylish apogees of De Palma’s vision—a vision that has only grown in salience since the 1980s.

On stage in front of the giant screen before the film last night, Paul Williams recalled the days when the film was released in 1974. "What was very good fortune for us, was that it wasn't a small hit, or even a big hit," Williams told the Canneds audience. "It was a film that, the people that loved it, would not walk away from."