Raison d'état

This is a wonderfully moody piece, featuring the magnificently brooding Gabriel Byrne as a journo on the trail of sinister conspiracies.

Dark, seedy and washed out, with a wealth of British stars, following an intricately woven thread of plot, this is a great example of old-fashioned, restrained British film.

Democratic governments are said to work in the public interest. All well and good. However, when that government decides to work in secret, then it becomes an enemy, not only to the people it purports to work for, but is contrary to the spirit of democracy. This is the premise to this film entitled " Defense of the Realm." In this story, our hero Nicholas Mullen (Gabriel Byrne) is an inquisitive newspaper reporter who stumbles across a sensitive story involving the cover-up murder of a school boy. The lad's death is hushed up by government authorities and involves a prominent cabinet official. The case is ultra secret so that when a Parliament official seeks to inquire into the death of the school boy, those who want to keep it from being re-opened, first seek to scandalize him, then discredit the first newsman who helps him, then anyone else who gets involved. After his colleague is found dead, Mullen takes up the challenge of exposing his friend's murder and soon finds himself threatened, then targeted for assassination. The movie is stark drama and with the aid of exceptional actors like Denholm Elliott, Ian Bannen and Robbie Coltrane produces an exciting and heart thumping atmosphere. A fine film and highly recommended as a late night thriller. Excellent! ****

This movie is a good example of the British film industry quietly making good movies that nobody saw. Brought out at the height of the cold war , as far as i know it was only ever seen on channel 4 (which kept the british film industry alive). The plot is hardly revolutionary. A journalist (a hard bitten Gabriel Byrne)stumbles upon a coverup by the british goverment, of a nuclear accident on an american airbase (which actually happened in the 1950s, but thats another story). Shades of disaster at silo seven, presidents men and forth protocol. But where this movie is different is the feeling that THEY are following you, helped by an understated yet eerie soundtrack. Byrne is followed by a car from the american airbase, it crowds him off the road and all of its windows are seen to be blacked out. He phones the American embassy and hears his phone being tapped.We dont even see the watchers untill the very end of the movie (which weakens it slightly) Even the Kangaroo court at the end of the movie is reminicnent of Franz Kafkas THE TRIAL. This is the X FILES without ufos, yet Byrne and scacchi are more that a little reminicent of mulder and scully (who also break the rule and dont fall in love on screen). Helped by fine performances from Denholm Elliot and Fulton Mackay(Robert Maxwell?), it evokes a patina of the hidden state only equilled in the uk by EDGE OF DARKNESS and Ken Loache`s HIDDEN AGENDA. its not the best thriller ever made in the UK, but it deserves a damn sight more attention than its received. See it , before THEY do.....

Well put together, and it will not do your paranoia any good at all! (But then, if you're not a bit paranoid, there's something wrong with you!)

Perhaps the characters could do with filling out a little, but on the whole, this is a very well-crafted thriller, to which you have to pay attention, as there are no big info-dumps or exposition: you have to work out a lot for yourself.

This taut, underrated little thriller might be called a British version of "The Parallax View". Ian Bannen plays a Profumo-like MP targeted by the security services because he knows too much. His career is ruined by muck-raking reporter Gabriel Byrne but the latter's determination to get to the bottom of the story, and his guilt at the death of a colleague (the superb Denholm Elliott), lead him down unexpected political byways...

"Defence of the Realm" can boast excellent location work and a convincing recreation of the vanished world of the "old" hard-drinking Fleet Street. The tone becomes darker and more claustrophobic as the film goes on and the apolitical Byrne enters a paranoid world of car headlights in the rearview mirror, bugged telephones and rifled apartments. The film taps into many of the issues that concerned the British Left in the mid-eighties (secrecy, American missiles on UK soil, the unaccountability of the security services, newspaper obsession with sexual gossip to the exclusion of harder material) and builds to a clever, if shocking, double-twist climax. Well worth locating and viewing.