Publication Date: 09-11-2026

Blow Out (1981) review

Dir. Brian De Palma

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★½

The great Alfred Hitchcock would’ve been delighted to see Brian De Palma’s Blow Out but he would’ve been more satisfied with actually making the film. The film deals with many of the themes Hitchcock did in his heyday such as voyeurism, the figurative “MacGuffin,” the intense mystery, the likable characters, and the slick presence of style by a tried-and-true cinephile.

De Palma casts Blow Out in a deeply bleak light. Shot on film obviously, with very dark tonalities and very dingily lit environments to establish an effective mood, De Palma centers the film around Jack Terry (John Travolta), a local sound engineer who loves working with the wondrous and limitless medium of audio and sound. To him, regular sounds have a distinct poetry to them, bearing a natural and too often unseen realm of musicality.

One day Jack ventures outside to capture sounds of trees being rustled by the wind for a low-budget film he’s working on when he witnesses a brutal car wreck right before his eyes. The vehicle appears to suffer from a blown tire before it careens off a bridge and into the water below. Without doing much thinking, Jack leaps in and is able to pull out a woman named Sally (Nancy Allen), who will later awaken in a heavily sedated state in the hospital. The entire event is captured through Jack’s sound recorder.

Jack is the only witness to the crime, and is told at the hospital room that the man who died in the accident was the governor and a possible presidential candidate. One of the governor’s advisers tells Jack to remain silent about what he saw, and tells Sally that she would be best off to skip town for a few months, seeing as she is a simple escort who would never want to be seen with the married governor. However, when a frame-by-frame layout of a released video of the accident is released in a magazine, Jack goes through the meticulous effort of animating the video and adding the sound files into the video to try and recreate the event, albeit in a choppy, unpolished state.

Jack believes that someone hiding in the bushes adjacent to the road the governor was driving on and fired a shot into the governor’s vehicle’s tire, leading him to lose control, swerve, and crash off the bridge. He believes the soundbite of the accident he recorded that night which houses an audible, deafening bang before the sound of tires-screeching is proof in and of itself that the governor was shot off the road in an orchestrated attempt at murder. But with the safer, less edgy story of the coverup being played and published everywhere, Jack’s efforts to look deeper into the event make him seem nothing more than a ridiculous conspiracy theorist.

Travolta gives off the vibe he once did of being the young, cool kid, yet one with a lot of brains and a lot of heart in Blow Out. Despite having a confident swagger and always seeming to be in a very assured state, the character of Jack Terry is deeply vulnerable, as he soon becomes the target of some shady figures that want to keep the governor’s death look like a simple tire blow out. With Jack’s professional sound engineering skills constantly being tested, the film plays like a hazy detective story that is brought to light by the use of incredible complex and unique technical equipment.

De Palma’s focus on the technical aspects of the sound engineering world is what makes Blow Out truly unique. We see Jack cut and paste all kinds of equipment, operate on now-primitive sound machines that allow sounds to be emphasized as well as subdued in the background, along with seeing the remarkable coherency of everything done. These technical aspects give Blow Out an added layer to its thriller, making the film more and enticing and more of a unique experience to invest in seeing as these concepts and features are scarcely explored in a film.

Films about filmmaking can either get lost in a sea of self-referential humor or simply get lost in their own facile stories. Blow Out remains alive from the second it begins to the second the credits roll, with an unexpected final fifteen minutes that manage to house so much tension and suspense it’s almost uncanny.

Starring: John Travolta and Nancy Allen. Directed by: Brian De Palma.