‘I’m afraid of the dark,’ confesses call-girl Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda) to a very private investigator John Klute (Donald Sutherland) as he enquires about a friend who has disappeared and who might have been leading a double life. Fear of the dark is the film’s main theme, particularly the darkness that can lurk in the heart of the most respectable of men. When the murderer finally comes to silence Bree because of what she knows, the overhead shot of his elevator ascent out of a pool of darkness conveys the sense of something bestial rising out of the man’s subconscious. Pakula’s stylish direction shows an unnerving disharmony between humans and their surroundings, and modern communications become prime sources of terror. Moodily photographed and eerily scored, this is a genuinely frightening film, and mandatory viewing because of Jane Fonda’s extraordinary Oscar-winning performance as a modern woman struggling for survival and control in a hostile, dangerous world. (Notes by Neil Sinyard).