Naomi Watts leads the cast of Australian director Phillip Noyce’s latest thriller, a confined film that commands a near solo performance from its leading lady as a widowed mother distraught by an unfolding event at her son’s school while she’s out for a morning run.
The small-scale thriller has become a subgenre all of its own in recent history. One of the stronger films in recent times is Steven Knight’s brilliant directorial debut Locke, with which The Desperate Hour shares a lot of its structure and narrative device. Watts is in every scene as frantic mother Amy Carr, who we learn early on has been recently widowed, leaving her and her two children – teenage Noah (Colton Gobbo), and younger daughter Emily (Sierra Maltby) alone in suburban Ontario. It is approaching the one-year anniversary of the passing of their husband/father, and Noah is clearly not coping with the fallout. He locks himself in his room, choosing to sleep in rather than attend school, while Amy tries to make things run as smoothly as possible.
On this particular morning, Amy gives up on shifting Noah from his slumber, heading out on a morning run through the Candian wilderness. Armed with just a phone, she goes about running errands – telling her bosses that she’s chosen to take a personal day, organising picking up her parents’ car, arranging to pick up some crafting that her daughter left behind at her nursery. Boring everyday stuff. Harnessing the fact that the dreaded anniversary is approaching – her parents are flying in for support – Amy notices speeding police cars hurtle down the road in the opposite direction; first one, then more. Continuing on her jog, and bearing more and more into the woods, she gets a call that her son’s school has been a victim to a shooting, an armed gunman running through the halls taking students hostage. The next hour or so plays out in near real-time as Amy frantically retreats back towards the school on foot, all the while using her trusty iPhone to ensure that her children are safe.
The plot of The Desperate Hour is simple, and Noyce’s direction is both inventive and effective. Despite the film taking place largely in a Canadian forest with most of the action taking place off-screen, the filmmaker keeps us involved by constantly moving his camera, and uses frenetic editing to heighten the sense of danger. Watts is excellent as Amy, easily the film’s biggest asset. She’s in every frame, completely commanding proceedings, a solid performance, which is much needed in a role like this as she is asked to carry the whole film.
Scriptwriter Chris Sparling has more than proven himself in the past – even in this genre with the Ryan Reynolds chamber-piece Buried, and here his script asks for more of the same tension and peril. It is this that the film goes after rather than focus on the social issues at its core; loss, grief, and the mental destruction as a result, the screenplay smoothing over them rather than developing them.
As a thriller, it more than works and, with a tight running time of just over 80 minutes, it doesn’t outstay its welcome.
The Desperate Hour will be released on Sky Cinema on 25th February.
The Desperate Hour
Summary
A solid performance from Naomi Watts makes this an involving watch that just about maintains interest tjroughout, despite its short running time.
