The Wolf Hour (2021)

The Wolf Hour (2021) is a psychological thriller. This film is in the same genre as “The Guilty” with Jake Gyllenhaal.

That is to say… we only see the same actor throughout the entire film (after having interviewed his daughter, who is sadly useless to the film and almost non-existent, and his son). Here, it’s Naomi Watts that we see alone for almost an hour. It’s towards the end of the film that we eventually end up seeing other people.

It hurts when I know I’m only going to give this film two stars. It almost breaks my heart. Because I can see the work that has gone into it.

Indeed, for over an hour, we see the actress using a lot of apps on her phone while jogging. Then she receives some very disturbing news about an armed robbery at her son’s school. As a result, she runs faster, but ends up in a couple of collisions, and her sprained ankle causes her to stagger for a while.

So everything about the phone, apps, FaceTime, texts, videos, hidden calls or calls from unknown numbers… it’s all impeccable and perfectly set up.

Unfortunately… when I watch a film, it’s precisely to forget my phone and the connected world we live in. So it really irritates me to see films like this.

It’s a very well-made film… but it’s so boring at the same time. It demonstrates how uninteresting the modern world is… when with our phones we think we’ll never be bored. But we’re just prisoners of it.

We are always connected, whereas we feel good when we are disconnected. Rather a very low-budget film.

It’s hard for me to criticise Naomi Watts, as she is undeniably a great actress. But here I think it was too much for her to have the whole film rest on her. And she doesn’t really manage to convey all the panic and emotion of the film and the horror of what’s happening.

In a film like this, you need action; you need to see what’s going on elsewhere and not just in this beautiful forest filmed by over-the-top cameras showing the magnificence of the colours. The direction is good, but making the telephone the main character of a film is the problem; the robot from Short Circuit managed to be expressive in two films at the time.