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In Death Watch (1980), Bertrand Tavernier’s unremittingly bleak reality-TV satire, a woman named Katherine (Romy Schneider) receives the worst news of her life. Near the beginning of the film, she’s told she has a rare disease so aggressive that it will ravage her body completely in about two months. There is no medicine she can take, no surgery to be done, to mitigate its effects.

Unbeknownst to Katherine, this awful news is also soon to become a matter of public interest. Death Watch takes place in an unspecified future where grocery-store speakers ominously intone things like “don’t steal, you’ll feel better” and where deadly illnesses have nearly been extinguished. To TV executives, capturing the travails of someone suffering from one is an unmissable programming opportunity. The head of a national station, Vincent (Harry Dean Stanton), has secretly colluded with Katherine’s doctor to sneakily film her receiving her diagnosis. If she takes the $300,000 Vincent plans to offer her afterward to record the rest of her experiences, then they’ll use that footage as the progenitive scene of the series — which the movie is named after — whose format is never entirely clear to us. (What we do know, based on a late-in-the-movie statistic, is that 37 percent of the population finds its very premise offensive.)

When the moment comes, Katherine takes the money. But after enough time lapses for her to become something of a celebrity, she goes on the run, disguised by a Louise Brooks-style wig. One of Vincent’s men, Roddy (Harvey Keitel), is assigned to follow her. When he catches up, under the guise of someone else, they develop the meaningful connection Vincent has been crossing his fingers for — one bound to be undermined by the fact that Roddy has recently implanted in his eyes cameras Vincent takes advantage of for the “Death Watch” feed. For Katherine, the relationship becomes a saving grace in a difficult situation. To Vincent, and to 63 percent of viewers, it’s a juicy new plotline. 

Like any movie released within the period sandwiched between reality TV’s nascence and ubiquity, Death Watch isn’t immune to of-its-time datedness. The idea that most of the public would stop what it’s doing to keep track of a 24-hour stream of a woman’s final days, as well as the idea that only a minority of the population would watch this all unfold without any ethical concern, feels more outrageously alarmist today than it might have in 1980, when reality TV was still too novel for the populace to accurately gauge the direction it would take through the decades. It’s also in general a weakness to be so coy about how the show is engaged with in this decidedly callous alternate reality. For how long has the TV landscape been so hyperbolically cynical? 

But other ideas Death Watch brings up remain pertinent outside of the inchoate reality TV realm it calls to mind, extending to the news cycle’s way of capitalizing on someone’s tragedy as means of entertainment and to the Instagram age’s implicit understanding that if your experiences aren’t in some way shared with the public then they are less meaningful. 

Death Watch isn’t a successful movie. The drama is too slowgoing to ever build up the thriller-like tension that should emerge from Roddy’s deceit; the last act effectively peters out. But it’s always interesting, and Tavernier’s decision to largely shoot the film in wet-and-cold Glasgow is savvy with its visual eeriness. This city looks expansive but also battered — it almost appears vacant in certain shots — and can make you feel like people are hiding in certain shadows or deserted buildings, watching your every move and cunningly switching locations as you move. And Schneider, who would star in only four more movies before tragically dying, at 42, in 1982, gives a mesmeric performance wavering from heartrendingly restrained to unselfconsciously exposed. It holds the movie together, and, now, has an additional veneer of sadness given how soon the fate of Schneider and her character would intersect, hit with cruel twists of fate and struggling with how to reconcile them.