If you were casting a movie about an alien invasion of Earth, who would play the human hero? One of our musclebound action stars, like Dave Bautista or Jason Statham? A magazine-cover beauty like Zendaya or Anya Taylor-Joy? Whatever script you’re working with, it’s unlikely you’d be on the lookout for a mustachioed, soft-spoken, fortysomething man to play a city bureaucrat gradually convinced that everyone around him is being replaced with soulless clones, but it’s this performance by the late Donald Sutherland that makes Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) a masterpiece of creeping dread.
Sutherland, who died Thursday at age 88, was an established leading man by the time he appeared in the sci-fi thriller, a remake of the 1956 film based on a serialized novel. To portray San Francisco health inspector Matthew Bennell, however, he had to be a convincing nobody — just another guy cruising around town in a drab trench coat. Even as he starts to encounter signs of an extraterrestrial species’ secret takeover, he remains a levelheaded voice of reason, trying to calm his panicked friends while searching for viable clues to what’s really happening.
The movie wouldn’t be so effective had Sutherland immediately leapt into protagonist mode: it’s the way his unruffled understatement slowly gives way to heightened emotion (the very thing that makes him a target of the dead-eyed pod people) that ratchets up the paranoia until the viewer, like Bennell, is studying every face on screen for a flicker of humanity, or the coldness of a parasite. The great irony of this version of the oft-adapted Body Snatchers, steeped in the malaise of the post-hippie era, is that in being the perfectly average everyman, Bennell is a direct threat to the conformity of the hive mind seizing control of the planet.
“I personally think one of the most important actors in the history of film,” wrote Sutherland’s son, the actor Kiefer Sutherland, in a statement announcing his death on Thursday. “Never daunted by a role, good, bad or ugly.” Bennell is one of the good roles, though it would have daunted a lesser performer. To come across as grounded and pragmatic as he becomes a quasi-reluctant whistleblower, always seeing the enemy over his shoulder, is how Sutherland sells the political message of a far-out allegory that could’ve easily melted into B-movie pulp. Instead, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is one of Rolling Stone‘s top sci-fi films of the 1970s.
Of course, Sutherland’s turn as a lonely survivor surrounded on all sides has a nasty final twist that few can forget, made all the more chilling by how much heart and empathy he has shown to that point. We believe Bennell has assimilated into the pod population by disguising his human qualities, betraying no signs of an inner life. Another character who has learned to blend in approaches him, assuming the same. Bennell suddenly points at her, opens his mouth, and emits a ghastly shriek: he’s a duplicate, alerting the others to an impostor in their midst.
Again, it might have felt absurd, and out of context, the image does make a fine meme. Yet for anyone who has watched the entire story unfold, learning to trust Sutherland all the way, the only reaction can be the shock of pure betrayal — and terror.
