Naomi Watts at sundance this year
<b>The</b> claustrophobic horror film "Wolf's Hour" is director Alistair Banks Griffin's second feature film.
The story takes place in the summer of 1977 in a residential area of south Bronx, New York, at a time when Americans are known as "Sam's Summer," a pronoun because a serial killer who called himself "Son of Sam, really named David Berkowitz," had been running rampant for a year, wandering the streets at night, killing passers-by at random, and his crimes finally ended in the summer.
The film clearly wants to create an internal crisis (a woman who is always maliciously harassed, fearing that she will be victimized by these harassers, and is deeply involved in fear), and wants to correspond this internal crisis to the turbulent social context of the time. But unfortunately, the tension of "Wolf's Hour" has not escalated, resulting in a dull plot, which is only 99 minutes long, but it is difficult to endure.
Naomi Watts plays June Leigh, a novelist who wrote a semi-autobiographical debut and was a huge success. But for some reason, her life now is overwhelmed by fear and dread. She lived in an apartment inherited from her late grandmother and never went out. The apartment has five floors, and she lives on the top floor, which used to be a nice building, but now it is dilapidated and messy, and there are frequent cases around it. When someone always rang the doorbell downstairs and connected to her house day and night, her already fragile nerves began to tense up more and more.
At first, she suspects freddie (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.), a young courier who delivers her groceries. Later, her sister Margot (Jennifer Ellie) came to accompany her, and the police came to help her, but they did not relieve her tension. The society outside was so turbulent that June had to try to return to her creative life and continue to write her long-delayed follow-up works.
Watts' performance is brilliant, reflecting the character's nervousness and sense of shame over the chaotic and complicated life that is now there. But the story itself is not interesting, does not sublimate her performance, and the only success of the film is that the character research is done well. Griffin's script is distracted by fragmentary details and forced plot development (such as when June's sister gives her a gun), and the whole story lacks organicity and does not start from the characters themselves, but instead seems to be based on a guidebook like "how to write a script".
In fact, it's easy to think of Wolf's Hour as a stage play, and perhaps the story would have been more appropriate for that format. There are many other films that are still wonderful even though they only use a single scene. But neither Griffin nor cinematographer Khalid Mohtaseb could come up with a good idea to make the film's visuals look more realistic, or to make the enclosed space come alive with fluid mirror movement and imagination. On the contrary, the art of the film only makes people feel messy, dirty and greasy. In short, apart from Watts's performance, this "Wolf's Hour" is not worth spending an hour watching.
<b>Note: Please continue to pay attention to the exclusive interviews, exclusive film reviews and other reports of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival Time Network. </b>