The Desperate Hour (2021)
This movie impacted me a lot more than I expected, in ways I didn’t expect. Naomi Watts is amazing, I felt everything she felt, emotionally and physically throughout this film. Without giving anything away, this tightly wound film tells the story of a family struggling to deal with the death of the father and husband one year prior. Watts plays Amy, a woman still covered in grief one year after losing her husband in a car crash. Her son Noah isn’t doing much better, barricading himself in his room every night, barely acknowledging anyone around him. The daughter, who is in grade school, seems to be handling the loss the best of any of her family. Once Amy is out for her daily run, the movie really begins. Amy receives a series of phone calls while running, and while also flashing onto memories of her husband. The mood is set just so, in order to make us care about what happens next.
Obviously, the subject of school shootings hits home for all Americans, since they unfortunately happen so often here, but that frequency doesn’t diminish the impact of it here. Watching Amy react to the news reports, calls and texts coming in once news of the shooting at her son’s school circulates, is very tense and well done. I wanted to do everything I could to help Amy get her questions answered, as well as help her get the hell out of the woods she seemed to suddenly be trapped in. That part of the story was tense, but not in a good way. Amy is a regular runner, we know this even though we’re not told this, so how does she get so turned around that it will take her almost an hour to get to Noah? Couldn’t she have just turned around, gone home and driven to the school? The movie had to find a way to introduce tension, but they could have found a better way than this lost in the woods routine.
As time kept ticking by and Noah’s fate became more and more precarious, Amy almost loses it, as any mother would, but then gets her second wind (literally) and gets to the school so we can all find out how things turn out.
I appreciate that there is a bit of a red herring about who the shooter is and other than the film choosing to insert Amy into the goings on at the school, with the police and 911, in a way that is QUITE unrealistic, I have to say I liked this film, if only due to Watts’ performance. The short end credit scene saves the ending; without that, I would have been disappointed and the film would have been pointless.
The only other real distraction for me is that I never take my cell phone with me when I walk, so if this had been me, I would have been back home before knowing what was going on, but I know many people do carry their phone with them everywhere, so this rings true for them.
As I said, enjoyable due to Watts’ and the tense atmosphere, even with a few unrealistic touches. 3 out of 5 stars.
