Death Watch

Death Watch is set in a near-future society where advanced medicine has largely conquered disease, leaving death a rare and unfamiliar event. When writer Katherine Mortenhoe is found to have an incurable illness, a television producer offers her a contract to have her final weeks recorded and broadcast as entertainment for a public hungry for the spectacle of dying. She initially accepts the arrangement, but the pressure of becoming public property drives her to flee, and she is pursued by a reporter whose eyes and brain have been fitted with a camera implant that transmits everything he sees.

Bertrand Tavernier directed the film, his second feature after Spoiled Children in 1977, working from a screenplay he wrote with David Rayfiel. Romy Schneider plays Katherine, with Harvey Keitel as the implanted reporter Roddy and Harry Dean Stanton as the television producer Vincent Ferriman. Max von Sydow appears as Gerald Mortenhoe, and the cast also includes Thérèse Liotard and Caroline Langrishe. The production was a German-French co-production from Gaumont International, Sara Films, Antenne 2 and SFP, running 131 minutes.

On IMDb, the film holds a 6.3 out of 10 rating from 121 votes.