Review: THE DESPERATE HOUR Exploits Real-Life Tragedy to Questionable Effect

In big, broad, unsubtle strokes, writer Chris Sparling (Greenland, Mercy, Buried) and veteran director Philip Noyce (Salt, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Clear and Present Danger) sketch out the background of the central character, Amy Carr (Naomi Watts), in The Desperate Hour, a spare, sparse suspense-thriller shot during the pandemic utilizing minimal resources.

A recently widowed, single mother of two children, Noah ( Colton Gobbo), a sullen, withdrawn teen, and Emily (Sierra Maltby), a seemingly well-adjusted preteen, Amy is struggling with the loss of her husband a year earlier, making her, if not an inattentive mother, then a slightly distant one, isolated by her grief even as she participates in the rituals and rhythms of everyday life. Amy can’t be described as a bad mother, of course, just one operating at less than the Platonic ideal of self-sacrificing, selfless motherhood.

While the audience can glean information about Amy based on where she lives and her socioeconomic status, along with her preference for long, lonely jogs into the forest nearby, Sparling and Noyce deliberately leave additional information about Amy unsaid and/or unshown. Still bereft and out of sorts, Amy decides to go on a five-mile run after saying her goodbyes to Emily (elementary school) and Noah (still in bed at home). So far, so normal for Amy, giving her the opportunity to work out her angst and despair through obligation-free physical activity.

Before long, however, an all-too-familiar tragedy strikes close to Amy’s home and family. All but wedded to her cellphone, Amy receives the kind of alert no parent ever wants to experience first-hand: A live shooter at her son’s high school, earlier foreshadowed by speeding police cars that pass Amy as she goes on her jog.

Noah, however, isn’t home, deciding to attend high school on possibly the worst day of his life and everyone else who unluckily crosses paths with the unseen shooter. From there, The Desperate Hour remains wholly with Amy as she makes calls to 9-1-1 (among others), tries to make calls that go nowhere or fall off at inopportune times, searches online for information about the shooting, and eventually, far from home and Noah’s school, attempts to get to Noah on her own, both on foot (a painful fall slows her down), and via less-than-reliable ride-share services.

With a lightly used premise that echoes other single-character, “real-time" narratives connected to the outside world thanks to the technical wizardry of cellphone technology, e.g., Phone Booth (man in a phone booth), Locke (man in a car), and Sparling’s own foray into similar material a decade ago, Buried (man in a coffin), The Desperate Hour follows a fairly predictable, if increasingly unrealistic, ludicrous road, throwing any number of obstacles in Amy’s path as she attempts to get to and somehow save Noah from the shooter. On its face, the premise has limited flexibility narrative-wise, but for challenge-hungry actors, it’s all but irresistible, giving the actor or performer the chance to utilize the full range of his or her craft front-and-center, often in lengthy close-ups (the better to show their respective ability to depict believable emotions).

All of which, unsurprisingly, Watts, one of our most underappreciated, often overlooked actors, delivers with admirable next-level commitment. Watts is never less than convincing from the first, seemingly normal scene to the last, moving moment before the end credits roll. The combination of the premise and what that premise implies for an actor makes it easy to understand why Watts or,  really, any actor would jump at the chance to play Amy Carr or someone in Amy’s position. Add to that the logistical limits of a global pandemic where a deliberately small-scaled film makes sense, common or otherwise, and The Desperate Hour offers similarly small-scale, superficial thrills.

The setting and plot driver (i.e., in-progress school shooting), however, cuts against those thrills. Just as it’s easy to understand why Watts took the role and why it was made during the pandemic, it’s also just as easy to feel more than slightly squeamish at the exploitative idea of a school shooting for a film, especially where and when Sparling and Noyce have little or next to little to add to the never-ending conversation about the epidemic of school shootings in the United States that remain painfully unaddressed as of this writing.

The Desperate Hour opens today (Friday, February 25) in movie theaters and is also available via On Demand platforms through Roadside Attractions and Vertical Entertainment.