The conspiracy movie remains an entertainment staple and a genre that’s increasingly incapable of keeping up with the actual conspiracies that flood news sites, social media and political discourse.
If the history of the conspiracy film proves anything, it’s that humans have always looked to someone else to blame for their unhappiness. From imperial powers pulling the strings of geopolitics in the early 20th century and the paranoia fuelled by the dread of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War in the 1960s to the breakdown of trust between citizens and governments arising from the ideological confrontations of the Vietnam War in the 1970s, to the current deep suspicion and fear generates by the rise of AI, conspiracy films have made the paranoid believe that somebody is indeed watching and controlling everyone and everything.
Below are three examples that are both of their time and all too relevant, offering more than enough proof that when it comes to cinema, the conspiracy genre has provided some of the medium's greatest works.
THE ARTHOUSE ESSENTIAL
Illustrious Corpses — YouTube
Based on Equal Danger a novella by Italian crime writer Leonardo Sciascia, director Francesco Rosi’s dark, paranoia-drenched offering from 1976 is an underappreciated classic of the genre, expertly creating a cloying atmosphere of dread and mistrust over its quietly unfolding narrative.
Actor Lino Ventura uses his battered visage to full and disquieting effect as Inspector Amerigo Rogas, tasked with unravelling the murder of a high court judge. As he tries to unravel the mystery, more judges are murdered. What was said to be a criminal matter soon becomes a political hot potato whose secrets pose a grave threat to the status quo.
Its final line, “Truth is not always revolutionary”, caused much controversy in a politically charged Italy at the time but history has been good to the film, which was placed on the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage’s 2008 list of “100 films to be saved.”
THE STONE-COLD CLASSIC
Dr Mabuse the Gambler — YouTube
Fritz Lang’s 1922 silent-era epic, made when the director was still resident in Germany, uses the anger and anxieties of post-World War 1 Europe to fuel its conspiratorial drama. Its intentions were later twisted by the Nazis who co-opted the film into their murderous anti-Semitic philosophy — much to the horror of Lang, who was half-Jewish and had by then fled to the US.
Released in two parts, this was the first in a trio of films that Lang made over the course of his career, inspired by the character of the evil mastermind Dr Mabuse, a character who first appeared in the novels of Norbert Jacques.
The criminal genius is aided by his gifts as a psychologist and master of hypnosis that enable him to rule over the dark underworld of Berlin where he controls gambling rackets, counterfeiting and other nefarious activities. Pursued by the authorities, the bad doctor gradually descends into total madness as he desperately fights to maintain his empire.
A prime example of the atmospheric German Expressionist cinema, the film draws on the terrible conditions and oppressive realities of the post-war era to create a bogeyman responsible for all the ills of a defeated German society.
While Lang believed Mabuse to be a symbolic representation of all the ills affecting Germany at the time, Nazi propagandists would later declare Mabuse to be the epitome of the Jewish stereotype created by Hitler.
THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH
The Prisoner — YouTube
At the height of the swinging sixties, actor Patrick McGoohan took all the countercultures emerging from the rebellious English social and cultural scene and wove them into what remains one of television’s strangest, cultish creations. A conspiracy wrapped in a puzzle box, thrown into a maze and performed through the lenses of everything from the occult to the absurd, and sprinkled with several spoons of surrealism.
McGoohan plays the enigmatic Number Six, a government secret agent who, after resigning from his job, is knocked out by gas released through the keyhole of his flat. He wakes up to find himself trapped in a coastal town where the maps, shop, taxi services and people have no connection to the outside world. As he tries to escape this strangely cheery place things become increasingly weirder and nothing makes sense for the better part of the 17 episodes that make up the show’s single season.
Rebellious, revolutionary, anti-authoritarian drama or a libertarian fable about the battle between the individual and the collective? The debate about the show’s intentions and its meaning are still ongoing. Whatever its ultimate meaning, it’s still a pinnacle of on-screen conspiracy that remains elusively strange and singularly inspired.
