Oh excellent!
Here's the (slightly misleading) trailer. I guess what beamish14 is talking about regarding one or other (or both) of the 'male leads' is that one of them (the American director) is a bit of a pompous guy at the beginning as a newbie film director with delusions of grandeur somewhat out of his depth in a foreign country (a self-deprecating, self-insert character?), and then is used more as a bit of a klutz in the second half of the film.The director is actually more doing the classic 'ditzy girl' role in this film, especially in the second half where he along with the gal pal (played by Fay Ripley a few years before she found TV fame in the UK in the Cold Feet series) become the amusing comic relief characters, who are fruitlessly trying to catch up to the chase and not able to do it until the very last moment, but still have to contend with various thugs or landladies also arriving late on the scene! And the other male lead is very much doing the Cold War paranoia espionage thriller type 'is he on my side or or is he one of the bad guys?' thing to the very last moment of the film. But really the thing that makes this film very different from De Palma (whilst its taking a lot of cues from him in terms of setpieces) is that the
real lead is the mute heroine and all of the action is filtered through her perspective. So the male characters
are somewhat inscrutable, when they are not just being outright silly, probably because they are reflecting some of the heroine's concerns about their reliability towards being able to keep her safe!
I really like this film although I don't know whether it is a particular spoiler to say that it is a film of two very tonally different halves! The first half could almost be a self-contained film in its own right as a brilliantly claustrophobic thriller, as our mute special effects/sound recordist heroine finds herself locked in the studio after hours and witnesses what at first seems like an illicit porno shoot turn into an even more illicit snuff film, and then spends the next 25 minutes or so playing cat and mouse games through the studio trying to retrieve a key and get to the door whilst remaining unseen, until it all climaxes in a brilliantly cathartically edited chase sequence. The second half widens out considerably, and goes from that masterfully tense claustrophobia to an almost just as tense (though more blackly comic) situation of the heroine trying to both prove that the snuff shoot took place to the disbelieving cops and friends; and then once the killers come knocking at her door and a mysterious man offers his services to escape them turns into a very impressive twist-upon-twist chase through the streets of Moscow before everyone double-crosses each other (even Alec Guinness!) in multiple fake-outs. You have to be OK with that severe tonal shift at the mid-point, but I do think that both halves of the film work really well even if I do prefer that claustrophobic and deadly serious first half slightly more.
For a horror-thriller about rather dark subject matter it is also a surprisingly funny film and is full of memorable scenes: the tense build up to the substituted footage for the cops; the desperate attempts by a mute person to first call for help and then when that fails trying to desperately attract the attention of the pervert watching her window from across the street by baring her breasts at him, only to have unfortunately chosen the exact millisecond at which he had broken off his intent observation to do so (not only illustrating her worst nightmare, but that of every voyeur too!); the almost Torn Curtain style amateurish attempts by the director and the gal pal to deal with a random Russian thug; and so on. In terms of the less comedic stuff, I love that after the drawn out tension of the cat and mouse sequence we get to the heroine being chased around the sound stage and being hemmed in by the lights being turned on, all leading up to that magnificent corridor run to the locked door at the end of that section of the film with the Jaws-style zoom in-dolly out move going on. And I love that idea that, for as klutzy as her American companions are, the gal pal is the one who is able to save the heroine by noticing that she is being held back from signing about the danger she is in (and I like that the gulf in communication, and how easy miscommunication is as compared to getting your point across, is the big theme of the film, from the cultural divides between the Americans and the Russians, to the main character being mute and for most of the time being separate from the one other character able to understand her, though that does let her do a bit of bridging the divide meet-cute romantic stuff with the mysterious potentially duplicitous saviour figure who can speak both Russian and English in the latter stages of the film)
I guess my only reservation about the film is that slightly overdone 'pleading look for help of someone at the point of mortal peril' with associated musical sting and push-in, which occurs throughout the film at key moments, first during the snuff scene when it shows that this isn't playacting but for real and then by the heroine in the middle of the film, and then notably at the end. Its a very bold move to do something like that, and it could be seen as a bit hokey, but I could just about handle it, especially as it gets elevated into being the whole crux of the drama running throughout the entire film - the only reaction by anyone that you can rely upon to be the 'real thing'.
(And if you wished to push it even further there is also a, thankfully relatively understated, implication that it is a kind of psychic communication of distress that only women are able to discern between each other, whilst the men around them remain pretty much dopily oblivious to the peril everyone is in!)
