Frantic

Director: Roman Polanski

1988 / 115min / 35mm

Polanski’s tightly wound, detail-rich thriller stars Harrison Ford, in a performance that makes brilliant use of the actor’s peculiar brand of finicky anxiety, as American doctor Dr. Richard Walker, whose wife mysteriously disappears from their hotel room during a visit to Paris. Greeted with blasé indifference by the local constabulary and US Embassy, Walker plunges into the Parisian underworld on a one-man mission to find his missing spouse, the staging of his odyssey—right up to the climactic confrontation on the Île aux Cygnes—displaying an intimate knowledge of the city, its neighborhoods, and its nightlife (the last-named scored to Grace Jones earworm “Strange”).