The second entry in Alan Pakula's Paranoid Trilogy is perhaps its weakest, but it's no less unsettling in its approach.
Released in the wake of the Warren Commission and in the run-up to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Parallax roots itself squarely in anxieties surrounding the high profile deaths of JFK, his brother Robert and Martin Luther King. Conspiracies abounded, and Parallax - starring Warren Beatty in the leading role - is a conspiracy film through and through, featuring reporter Joseph Frady as he uncovers an international cabal dedicated to assassinating leading political figures.
The atmosphere created by Pakula is uniquely unsettling, with Parallax playing out like some weird distortion of an action film and less as a traditional thriller. There's still dread, and Pakula's story is just as unnerving as his others, but it's a different kind altogether, exemplified in full by the horror of the film's infamous montage sequence, which is always worth a watch regardless of whether you're yet to see it or not.
Oh, and that ending is fantastic. Terrifying, but fantastic all the same.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
