The Desperate Hour review: A new kind of ticking-clock thriller

Setup of The desperate hourThe filmmakers are faced with a difficult dilemma in directing ‘The Twits’, which is a taut thriller that almost feels like real time. It’s accessible, mass-market entertainment with a premise hinging on an extremely divisive issue: school shootings, and therefore gun control. They should tackle the issue directly or risk alienating large swathes of their audience. Do they prefer to soft-pedal the topic and trust that their characters’ empathy will change minds?

Team behind The desperate hour — veteran Australian director Philip Noyce (Patriot Games) and screenwriter Chris Sparling (Burial) — take the second option. They strip the story down to its barest essentials until it’s just a mother, alone with her phone and her rising sense of panic. Like last year’s GuiltyThis is a simple one-hander with Watts attempting to play off several voices through her earbuds.

Amy Carr (Watts), is a grieving widow who has an elementary-aged daughter and a teenage boy. A morning comes when she decides to take a break, pack her daughter onto the bus and try to wake her child Noah. While she’s on a run in the remote woods near their hometown, her phone rings off the hook: her daughter’s school, a friend organizing a moms’ night out, the auto repair shop, her mother who’s flying in that day. Even when she sets her phone to “do not disturb,” an angry buzz cuts through: an emergency alert from the local police department. It’s the call every parent dreads. There’s an “ongoing incident,” and the town’s schools are on lockdown.

Vertical Entertainment

Much of the 81 minutes of small-scale action that follows is just about Amy’s mental and physical ordeal as she responds to the news and tries to reach the school. It only ends at the end. Even then, it is barely open at all. Watts is present in every frame of the movie. It’s a testament to the screenplay’s tight structure and to Watts’ peerless ability to hold the frame that The desperate hourAs a thriller, it works very well. The film does work as a thriller. Noyce knows how to build suspense within tight constraints; before he directed Harrison Ford as Jack Ryan in spy blockbusters, he made his name (and Nicole Kidman’s) with Dead CalmThe gripping thriller “The Boat” was only three characters in 1989.

Watts plays a fantastic role in the movie. She excels at desperation and confusion, and she knows how to show naked, raw fragility while disclosing an iron inner strength that’s almost frightening. These qualities are essential to the film’s success. Working with offscreen callers and assisted by solid sound design, Watts builds out the situation so convincingly that it fills the audience’s imagination. The film’s length is only one hour. But it doesn’t surprise me that Watts does not spend much time with the camera.

Problems arise, though, when Sparling’s script pushes Amy toward a greater agency in the awful drama unfolding at the school. Amy is reckless and irresponsible, making little sense. She also sets the wheels for events that are even more absurd. It’s a step too far in the name of dramatic expediency, destroying the faith that Watts has so carefully built in the character.

Lakewood Film

The desperate hourFilmmakers seem to be unwilling to confront the reality of the school shootings, which has a traumatic resonance that creates urgency and dread. The film is sharp on the specifics of what’s happening at the school, at least within the confines of its plot, but vague to the point of caricature about Why? it’s happening. Noyce and Sparling evoke the horror parents feel when their children are in mortal danger, and touch on the deeper, darker terror that those children’s lives are, on some level, unknowable, always out of reach. But they don’t entirely grasp the sheer insanity of parents in a prosperous country in peacetime fearing that their kids might be shot dead at any moment — even though that’s the very premise of the movie.

Maybe that’s because they refuse to name the culprit. Over the end credits, there’s an earnest plea that it’s time to “stand up” and that “this has to stop.” But what is “this”? The word “guns” isn’t mentioned once. This seems to be unforgivably vague and is not precise enough to convince those who are most in need of this message. It is possible to The desperate hourYou can make a difference in one’s mind just by being stealthy and by refusing to blame others. It seems likely, however that it will not be able to overcome preconceptions and will instead call for action.

The desperate hourIt will be available simultaneously on both digital platforms such as Apple and in theatres AmazonFebruary 25, 2005