The Desperate Hour Review: A New Kind of Thriller

The establishment of The Desperate Hour, a near real-time suspense thriller starring Naomi Watts, presents the filmmakers with an uncomfortable dilemma. It’s accessible, mass-market entertainment with a premise that hinges on a highly controversial issue: school shootings and, by extension, gun control. Should they tackle this issue head-on and risk alienating a significant portion of the audience? Or should they take it easy, hoping that empathy for their characters and the story’s inherent drama can secretly change minds?

The team behind The Desperate Hour – veteran Australian director Philip Noyce (Patriot Games) and screenwriter Chris Sparling (To bury) – take the second option. They strip the story down to the bare essentials, until it’s just about a mother, alone with her phone and her mounting panic. Like last year The guiltythis is effectively a one-handed game, with Watts playing a series of voices in her earbuds.

Amy Carr (Watts) is a grieving widow with an elementary school daughter and a teenage son. One morning, taking a very personal day, she packs her daughter on the school bus and tries to drag her depressed son, Noah, out of his bed. As she runs in the remote woods near her hometown, her phone rings constantly: her daughter’s school, a friend organizing a mothers’ evening, the auto repair shop, her mother flying in that day. Even when she puts her phone on Do Not Disturb, it buzzes angrily: an 911 call from the local police department. It’s the call every parent dreads. There is an “incident in progress” and the city’s schools are in lockdown.

Photo: Vertical Entertainment

Much of the ensuing 81 minutes of little action revolves around Amy’s mental and physical ordeal as she responds to the news and tries to reach the school. The film doesn’t open until the very end, and even then only just. Watts is in every second of the film. It’s a testament to the script’s tight structure and Watt’s unparalleled ability to keep things in context The Desperate Hour works as a thriller at all. But it does: This is a tense watch with a reckless pace. Noyce knows how to build tension within tight confines; He made his name (and Nicole Kidman’s) before directing Harrison Ford as Jack Ryan in spy blockbusters dead quieta riveting 1989 thriller with just three characters on a boat.

Watts is fantastic in the film. Characterized by despair and confusion, she knows how to display naked, raw fragility while revealing an ironclad inner strength that is almost frightening. The film depends entirely on these qualities. Watts works with interlocutors from the off and supports it with a solid sound design. He builds the situation out so convincingly that it captures the audience’s imagination. It’s surprising to realize that a lot of the movie is just a woman running around for an hour because it feels like so much more.

However, problems arise when Sparling’s script pushes Amy for a bigger role in the horrific drama unfolding at the school. Amy does completely irresponsible things that make little sense and sets events in motion that make even less sense. It’s a step too far in the name of dramatic expediency and destroys the confidence Watts so carefully built into the character.

Image: Lakewood Film

The Desperate Hour depends on the traumatic resonance of school shootings to create urgency and fear, but the filmmakers seem unwilling to grapple with the realities involved. The film is keen on the specifics of what is happening at the school, at least within the confines of its plot but vague to the point of caricature why It happens. Noyce and Sparling evoke the horror parents feel when their children are in mortal danger, touching on the deeper, darker terror that the lives of those children are at some level unknowable and always unreachable. But they don’t quite understand the sheer madness of parents in a prosperous, peacetime country who fear their children could be shot at any moment – even though that is the very premise of the film.

Maybe that’s because they refuse to pinpoint the culprit. In the credits he earnestly pleads that it’s time to “get up” and that “this has to stop”. But what is that”? The word “weapons” is not mentioned once. That seems unforgivably evasive and not specific enough to convince those who need to hear this message. When The Desperate Hour even change an opinion through stealth, by refusing to point fingers, then maybe it was the right decision. But it seems more likely that his lack of courage leaves prejudice unchallenged and his call to action rings hollow.

The Desperate Hour debuts simultaneously in cinemas and on digital platforms such as Apple and Amazon on February 25th.