Silkwood(1984)

5 Oscar nominations, including Best Director
Short pooper:
Karen (Meryl Streep) turns up dead as a result of “an alleged car crash in which she was the only one involved” and all the paperwork she was carrying with her, en route to meet the New York Times journalist, is mysteriously gone.

Longer version:
After Karen and many of her co-workers at the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant show signs of being contaminated with plutonium from the fuel rods they worked with -she, herself, appearing to show hundreds of times the legal limit in her organism- and she discovers the management of the plant are trying to cover up ongoing irregularities and dangerous acts of malfeasance -industrial X Rays retouched to hide faults, altered records of safety measures, complaints deliberately falling on deaf ears-, all the while trying to put the blame of the contamination incident squarely on her, she decides to step up and dig deeper to do something about it.

Moreover, such is the level of complications this causes for her that many items at her house, due to the radioactive pollution, have to be destroyed and everyone in the household is required to undergo further testing to rule out any life-threatening damage. On top of it, her lesbian roommate and friend Dolly (Cher) starts a relationship with Angela (Diana Scarwid), a mortuary beautician, who moves in, creating tension in the house and further straining her own relationship with Drew (Kurt Russell), who, eventually, fed up with what he perceives as her pointless obsession with gathering evidence to pursue a case against her corrupt employers -and, according to him, an excuse to secretly see someone else- breaks up with her and moves out.

Undeterred and against all odds, Karen continues her crusade of gathering proof to come after Kerr-McGee for their rampant irresponsibility, even coming across damning paperwork. By November of 1974, she feels she has attained enough and gets in touch with David Burnham, a journalist from the New York Times, to go public. On November 13, after a union meeting -where everyone present corroborated that she had folders, bundles of documents and a notebook in her possession-, she drove off to meet Burnham. En route, however, someone suddenly approaches her from behind and blinds her with their headlights to the point that she is seen squinting and distracted from what is ahead on the road. The screen slowly goes blank and we are then shown Karen’s car having driven off the road and crashed against a culvert. It is revealed that Karen got killed in the single-car collision and all the paperwork she had with herself for the meeting vanished without a trace, was never found and the official reports made no mention of it whatsoever.

The movie ends showing Karen’s close acquaintances and relatives deeply distraught with the news of the accident while her totaled vehicle is towed back to town, and a glimpse of her gravestone, with a vision of her smiling and waving at Drew one last time before driving off to her doom. Title cards inform that the circumstances of Karen’s death are, to this date, an unresolved mystery, despite it having been ruled as an unfortunate accident.