The Fury (Brian De Palma, 1978)

Brian De Palma’s The Fury is thrilling and perplexing: it might have been designed as a test case for separating out a subject's mixed feelings about the director. The plot starts with the snatching of Robin Sandza, a telepathically gifted teenager, from his intelligence agent father (Kirk Douglas), in an operation overseen by the father’s colleague and supposed friend Childress (John Cassavetes). The elder Sandza goes undercover to find the boy: the plot expands to include another gifted teenager (Amy Irving), a benign research project and a nefarious one behind it. The film teems with sensational moments and sequences, showing off De Palma’s sensuous feeling for spatial relationships, his bravura use of slow motion, of silence, of startling camera angles, of lush orchestration. It’s hardly without feeling for actors either: Irving is touchingly troubled, Carrie Snodgress movingly doomed, and Douglas and Cassavetes are both seeped in resonance (even if their two sets of resonances barely seem to mesh). But the film’s point and meaning remain perpetually obscure: put simply, it seems unworthy of De Palma’s care and attention (regardless that it could almost be positioned as a sequel to his previous film Carrie). The opening scene in the “Middle East” carries a promise of political specificity, but it devolves from there into a generalized, uninformative paranoia about unknown government agencies that apparently operate with impunity (perhaps the theme of potentially transformative mental power becoming corrupted and self-destructive is intended to carry some broader resonance about the workings of authority). The film’s most interesting aspect is perhaps its bitter play with concepts of real and allegorical parenthood: the telepathic teenagers both shift from biological to symbolic fathers, with destabilizing results. There’s some bitter comedy in the dark ending to Douglas’ quest, and beyond that in the pyrotechnic fate of Cassavetes’ villain (which certainly looks like a homage to the climax of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, to complement the evocation of Hitchcock at various other points). But the film almost seems designed to confound any clear finding of meaning or significance.