That the film hadn’t actually been inspired by Watergate or the Nixon tapes didn’t matter. In a moment when surveillance tech was becoming interwoven into every aspect of daily life, The Conversation quickly became a conversation piece—an allegory about the collapsing gap between a generation’s public and private lives. [N]o matter how many careers Coppola has, he’s unlikely to match the potency of [its] coda: The manic yet methodical energy with which Harry goes about (literally) dismantling his own little corner of the world—in search of a bug that may or may not exist—provides an indelible image of physical and psychological ruin. A heartbreaking, blood-chilling glimpse of the expert (or maybe the artist) as a helpless, compulsive prisoner of his own devices.
— Adam Nayman (The Ringer)
Synopsis: A paranoid, secretive surveillance expert has a crisis of conscience when he suspects that the couple he is spying on will be murdered.