Closed Circuit is structured, in one sense, as a straightforward commercial thriller, with a series of mysterious and bloody murders and a wide variety of potential suspect, each with a secret to hide. Its location and the crimes commited, however, deal with the nature of film itself - from the pictures on the screen to the administration of the cinema - and specifically with film as both a projected illusion and as an audience's temporary reality. This central idea is ingeniously and diectly woven into the fabric of the film's story: a small audience file into the matinee in an Italian provincial town to watch a spaghetti western. Many of the audience are using the cinema as a refuge from an uncomfortable reality in the world outside an adukterous couple make a clandestine rendevous, a middle-aged homosexual attempts a furtive pick-up - but their escape, the film, the cinema, dramatically impinges upon their lives. The last reel is the classic Western shootout but as the gunman fires at the camera, a member of the audience slumps dead in his seat, a bullet hole in his chest. Chaos erupts, the police are called in, close the cinema and restage the crime. At exactly the same moment in the film, a second man dies.....