Language: English
Naomi Watts co-stars with an iPhone in Phillip Noyce’s new suspense drama, built around the subject of high school shooting. The topic is one of concern in the US, and not surprisingly continues to be fodder for Hollywood filmmakers. In The Desperate Hour, Watts, as a heroic mother, spends a desperate hour plus some minutes running about and making frantic calls to save the day for her kids, even as the narrative tries serving up the thrills with social commentary in real time.
Noyce’s career of over four decades is highlighted by thrillers themed around the concept of race against time (think Dead Calm, Patriot Games, Clear And Present Games, The Quiet American, Rabbit-Proof Fence, The Bone Collector or Salt). The Hollywood veteran’s new film is in sync with his generic preference, and the filmmaker opts for a lockdown setting as backdrop this time. The runtime of 80 minutes unfolds in a town where all schools are suddenly locked down owing to an emergency, and the narrative tries using that situation to draw up its quota of thrills.
The lockdown set-up lets Noyce and screenwriter Chris Sparling play around with deserted outdoor spaces while creating angst for Watts. She plays Amy Carr, a single mother of two, who lost her husband a while ago. Amy’s teenage son Noah (Colton Gobbo) is still struggling to overcome the grief of his father’s loss. On the fateful Friday morning when the story begins, Amy takes the day off from work. She packs off daughter Emily into the prep school bus but Noah is reluctant to go to school. Amy promises him a movie and dinner outing later that evening, and sets off for a jog in the outskirts of the town.
With incessant calls disturbing her run, Amy switches on the ‘do not disturb’ mode. The tranquillity is disturbed soon enough, with an emergency alert message from the Sherriff's office: All schools in town have been "placed on lockdown due to an ongoing incident." Parents are urged not to drive to any school in the county. Amy discovers soon enough that the “ongoing incident” involves a shooter taking over the local high school where Noah studies, with the students and staff as hostage. Worse, she gets to know her son did leave home with his school backpack after she went out jogging. Far away from town and stranded without her car amidst wilderness, Amy just has her phone to reach out to people as she desperately tries to gather updates.
If the narrative puts Watts in a situation where she is alone and helpless, Noyce has fallen back on one of the best brains in business when it comes to creating such a milieu on screen. Writer Chris Sparling redefined claustrophobia with terrific, terrifying impact in the grim 2010 thriller Buried (Ryan Reynolds locked alive in a coffin under a few feet of sand with a cellphone, Zippo lighter, torchlight, and a knife). Like in Buried, the cellphone becomes the protagonist’s only tool of access to the world she is cut off from, and hence is significant for plot progression.
Theoretically, the idea would seem like an instant winner on paper, also topical given the high school shooting backdrop. However, the cinematic treatment lacks deeper intent. Unlike more accomplished generic efforts such as Elephant or Polytechnique, the film’s attempted commentary comes across as a knee-jerk reaction to what has concerned the real world.
Noyce and Sparling seem happy tapping into a relevant issue for the sake of creating an old-school commercial thriller and little else.
The outcome is middling, and the endeavour is lost in execution. Old-school turns into obsolete as the film increasingly banks on jaded storytelling devices to carry forward the plot, a lot of which appears contrived. Standard cliches that the narrative resorts to include Amy hurting her foot and being forced to hobble in the wilderness even as she races against time to reach her son’s school. Since the cellphone is her only source of connection, she loses signal at crucial moments.
Without giving away spoilers, the perpetrator’s motive is hardly original. It has been overused in mainstream cinema of this genre down the years. A few plot spins inserted to heighten suspense are too set-piece in nature to intrigue, and you know right away they are red herrings. A mainstream thriller as this one is almost invariably limited by the predictability with which it unfolds and ends. The least Noyce could have done is settle for a screenplay that engrossed with a few smart twists as the film moved towards its finale.
It is odd that does not happen, for Sparling’s past scripts such as ATM, The Atticus Institute or The Sea Of Trees have proved that the screenwriter aces the art of shocking with scares built around characters trapped in confined spaces. The Desperate Hour sticks to that template. Only, we witness the situation from the outside because the camera never leaves Amy, who is stranded out of town.
We ‘see’ the terrifying ordeal of the students in the high school through her phone conversations. The narrative falters, however, in this context. Since Amy has to bank wholly on her phone, the action largely involves her running about and frantically making calls, even to strangers. Her situation is meant to highlight desperation tinged with distress, and extract audience sympathy. The film hardly manages that outcome because the writing is not convincing enough. There is an element of plasticity as the chain of events unfolds. After a point, it seems like Sparling and Noyce were merely trying to manufacture a COVID-era film that cashes in on lockdown psychosis.
The film is structured as a one-artiste show for Naomi Watts, and we ‘meet’ the most of the remaining cast mainly through their voices on the phone, or on video calls and in video clips. Brilliant almost every time she faces the camera and flaunting a rich roster of past works, Watts here gets very little drama to play with beyond frenetic outbursts into her phone and limping about with a sprained ankle.
The Desperate Hour is not a dismal effort; it is not a great show either. A creative ending would have helped.
The Desperate Hour is streaming in India on Lionsgate Play.
Rating: **1/2
Vinayak Chakravorty is a critic, columnist, and film journalist based in Delhi-NCR.
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