"The Desperate Hour" an involving one-woman show for Watts but also a queasy cheap-thrills exercise

The Desperate Hour (2022)

Whenever a film is in some way about a school shooting, it runs the risk of feeling tacky and exploitative. Two have recently handled such subject matter with some delicacy as character dramas. “Mass” was about two sets of adults, a shooter’s parents and one of the victim’s parents. “The Fallout” was about what happens after surviving a school shooting from the perspective of two teenage girls. Now for a film that uses a shooting as its plot impetus, “The Desperate Hour” (formerly known as “Lakewood” at its TIFF premiere) is a real-time thriller exercise hinging on the skill of one actor on the phone, like Tom Hardy on his BMW Bluetooth in “Locke” and Jake Gyllenhaal as a 911 operator in “The Guilty.” It does mostly work as a delivery system for relentless tension, but what it’s in the service of leaves a bad aftertaste.

Naomi Watts plays Amy Carr, a widowed mother still coping with the loss of her husband whose one-year anniversary is approaching. She’s not the only one, as her teenage son Noah (Colton Gobbo) is still in bed and feels like skipping school. After waving to her daughter on the school bus, Amy sure picked the wrong day to go for a long morning run in the woods. A bunch of incoming phone calls distract Amy from the music on her earbuds. Then she gets a code-red alert on her phone: there’s an active shooter at Noah’s high school. In a panic, Amy begins making a series of calls to get more information, including Noah, whose phone keeps going to voicemail, and a teacher at her daughter’s elementary school on lockdown. Once getting confirmation from a neighbor that Noah did actually go to school, Amy will have to beat the clock on foot to reach the evacuation site and hopefully reunite with her son. 

“The Desperate Hour” forces one to be of two minds. On one hand, it does keep the viewer involved and stressed out for almost all of its scant yet propulsive 84 minutes. Director Phillip Noyce capably builds tension on Amy’s run, with overhead shots of Amy surrounded by idyllic fall foliage, and sustains it at a kinetic, riveting pitch. There is also a case to be made for “The Desperate Hour” only adding up to an exercise that uses a school shooting as a device to get some cheap thrills. By only focusing on Amy, it is maybe less questionable in taste than it might have been, but less ill-advised decisions could have still been made. 

While it plays out in the moment, “The Desperate Hour” is dramatically urgent and queasily effective as a parent’s worst nightmare. None of us know how we’d respond in such a crisis until it actually happens, and Amy behaves probably as well as any parent on a run could. Then again, there comes a point where director Noyce (2014's "The Giver") takes audience manipulation to overblown degrees, letting the distressing music swell and including so many shaky, illegible screenshots of Amy’s phone. The script by Chris Sparling (who proved more with less in “Buried”) just goes too far to strain credulity, like having Amy hunt down the shooter’s phone number, all while jogging with a limp through the forest, and then becoming an amateur hostage negotiator. Once the film is over, there is catharsis but nothing revelatory to think about besides wishing school shootings weren't still part of our new normal.

No Naomi Watts performance comes to mind that didn’t feel committed and full of heft, and the same goes for her one-woman show as Amy. Emotionally and physically, Watts does the best she can in a role that literally keeps her breathless, on the run, and juggling phone conversations with another mom, a 911 dispatcher, a helpful auto-body shop worker, and a police detective who might commit the worst mistake for a worried parent. Watts carries most of this to the finish line, but besides keeping the viewer concerned and on edge, don’t be surprised if you’re left wondering if it was all for the right reasons. Given the PSA during the end credits, it’s hard to believe that “The Desperate Hour” was made with an insidious agenda and not noble intentions to inspire some sort of change. The only change that the film should inspire is for filmmakers to be smarter and more thoughtful when incorporating real-life tragedies into the stories they want to tell. 

Grade: C +

Vertical released “The Desperate Hour” (84 min.) in theaters, on digital, and on demand on February 25, 2022.