Sabotage

Sabotage (1936) is Alfred Hitchcock's London-set spy thriller — watch it online on iFILM. Karl Verloc runs a small cinema in a quiet suburb, presenting himself as a harmless shopkeeper. He is nothing of the sort: Verloc is a sleeper agent carrying out bombings for a shadowy organisation while Scotland Yard closes in.

When he senses surveillance, Verloc makes a decision that shapes the entire film — he hands a ticking parcel to his wife's teenage brother Stevie and asks the boy to deliver it across town. Sylvia Sidney as Mrs. Verloc and Oskar Homolka as her husband circle each other in scenes of almost unbearable domestic tension. Hitchcock rarely let the dread land this quietly.

Based on Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent, the film pushed its audience harder than Hitchcock's own comfort zone allowed — he later admitted the bus sequence was a mistake, too cruel even for him. That willingness to follow the story somewhere ugly is exactly what makes it worth revisiting. Stream Sabotage (1936) online on iFILM.