Witness

A young Amish boy travelling through Philadelphia witnesses a murder in a station washroom. The victim turns out to have been an undercover narcotics officer, and the child is the only person who can identify the killers. Detective John Book takes on the case and, after discovering that the crime reaches into his own department, hides the boy and his mother in their Amish settlement in rural Pennsylvania. There the city policeman has to adjust to a farming community that lives without modern conveniences, while the men who want the witness silenced close in.

Peter Weir directed the film, the sixth of the thirteen features he has made in chronological order, following The Year of Living Dangerously and preceding The Mosquito Coast. William Kelley, Earl W. Wallace and Pamela Wallace wrote the screenplay, and Edward S. Feldman produced. Harrison Ford plays Book, with Kelly McGillis as the widowed mother Rachel, Lukas Haas as her son Samuel, and Josef Sommer, Jan Rubeš and Alexander Godunov among the supporting cast. The production drew on a budget of about 12 million US dollars and returned roughly 116 million worldwide.

Viewers rate the film 7.3 out of 10 on IMDb across some 113,000 votes, and 7.1 out of 10 on TMDB, where the vote count is much smaller. A critics' score of 8.8 out of 10 from 48 reviews is markedly higher than either audience figure.