& # 39; Wolf Hour & # 39; | Sundance 2019



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Naomi Watts plays a troubled novelist who locks herself in the huge South Bronx apartment during Sam's summer in Alistair Banks Griffin's thriller.

Naomi Watts Degraded as a Paranoid Agoraphobe, Locked in Her Grandmother's Apartment in Southern Bronx, on Cigarette and Alcohol Diet While New York Shivers, Sweats, and Burns The hour of the wolf. We are in 1977, the summer of Sam, and the growing number of murders is sowing panic in the city. But the condition of Watts' character, June Leigh, a counter-culture novelist whose first book caused a sensation, is her own creation. Where is it? These are the foundations of the claustrophobic psychological thriller of screenwriter-director Alistair Banks Griffin, a spectacular vehicle that plays harder on the texture of the surface than on the involvement of characters.

You can not criticize Watts' involvement in the role of such an air-tight film that it could almost be a play. But it is a food of the second clbad, Polanski, which creeps without much force beyond the simmering terror of the neurotic protagonist and the vague threat of an intercom buzzing intermittently without anyone. Since the only way for a movie like this to end – alert spoiler! – It is for her that she can face her fears and leave the room. You must be concerned about the character so that this emergence hides no emotional impact.

New York as a cauldron of violence and unrest is a familiar backdrop. The perfect storm of 1977 that combined a wave of murders, a city in financial crisis, a relentless heat wave and a power outage resulting in looting and arson has been transformed into a frenzied and self-effacing symphony. -provoking by Spike Lee in 1999. Summer of Sam. Here, it's a background noise that never represents much; Griffin is more interested in the existential threat, the creeping monster of guilt and the second-year block of a once-esteemed writer whose stock fell during the long wait of his second book. In terms of the mechanics of the plot, it's a thin oatmeal. Even a Chekhovian gun hides under the floor and is quickly forgotten.

It's unclear how long June has been closed, but the garbage bags that accumulate are attracting flies and the worry of her old friend Margot (Jennifer Ehle) when she returns by force, this is obviously a long time. Margot helps her clean up and when she finds tons of brilliant crude prose, she asks June to finish and submit the novel. But June becomes hostile and leads her into an irrational drunken rage crisis. At that time, she appears conveniently in a TV interview on VHS, while she was among the best sellers to give us the root of her trauma, a revelation that does not bring much drama punch. .

Other emissaries from the increasingly chaotic outside world appear throughout the film, the only regular visitor being Freddie (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a delivery man from the local bodega. It stays long enough to wash and wax philosophically with such a purple dialogue that it is the first clue that we could look at the embryonic form of June's second novel.

There is also a sordid cop (Jeremy Bobb), who responds to the 911 harbadment complaint filed in June suggesting that he could periodically stop to monitor her in exchange for an "arrangement" "badual. This obviously does not work well with the principled feminist who has made waves by declaring herself a reluctant witness of cultural genocide. But she has physical needs, as midnight cowboy Billy (Emory Cohen) points out, allowing June to relax for a minute in the post-carnal glow until that annoying ringing feels again. Somewhere along the way, she is prompted to pull out the typewriter and bang on that late book.

It's pretty easy to see what has attracted a talented actor like Watts in this single note material, as it's more of a solo show, the remaining cast serving as a support for drawing different shades of the damaged personality of June. The problem is that it is too hard and extremely heavy to attract us to his world. Watts plays his anguish to the end, but even when the causes are exposed, it remains a pretty obvious metaphor for a declining society, both today and now. As such, The hour of the wolf – that pays granular attention to cleverly grungy visuals, washing ambient sound filtering from the outside and the strategic use of a moody partition dotted with nerve ropes – looks like a movie B paralyzed by its own importance.

Location: Sundance Film Festival (Next)
Distribution: Jennifer Ehle, Emiko Cohen, Naomi Watts, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Brennan Brown, Jeremy Bobb
Production Companies: Automatik, Bradley Pilz Productions, in badociation with HanWay Films

Director-writer: Alistair Banks Griffin
Producers: Bailey Conway Anglewicz, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Bradley Pilz
Producers: Naomi Watts, Fred Berger, Felipe Dieppa, Kate Driver, Garrett P. Fennelly, Linda Moran, Taryn Nagle, Philip W. Shaltz
Director of Photography: Khalid Mohtaseb
Production Designer: Kaet McAnneny
Costume Designer: Brenda Abbandandolo
Music: Saunder Jurriaans, Danny Bensi
Publisher: Robert Mead
Casting: Stéphanie Holbrook
Sales: CAA

99 minutes

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