About

In an unnamed country, escaped fugitives MacConnachie (Robert Shaw) and Ansell (Macolm McDowell) run for their lives from a ruthless aerial assailant: a helicopter that tenaciously pursues the pair across the barren, unforgiving terrain surrounding them. With their hands tied, and with minimal resources at their disposal, the duo must use all means necessary to escape and survive.

Based on the eponymous 1968 novel by Barry England, this nail-biting survivalist thriller by Palme D’Or winning director Joseph Losey is an arresting meditation on conflict and predation, and the limits to which people will go to survive. Informed by the director’s own political persecution as a member of the Communist party in his native USA during the 1950s, the film is rendered with dramatic heft by visceral performances by lead stars Shaw (who also adapted the script) and McDowell. An underappreciated classic of 1970s filmmaking, Figures in a Landscape is a riveting and deeply metaphorical vision of paranoia.