Written and directed by Alistair Banks Griffin
Starring Naomi Watts, Brennan Brown, Jennifer Ehle and Kelvin Harrison Jr. 
Running Time: 1 hour and 39 mins
MPAA Rating: R for language and brief sexuality/nudity

by Sara Clements

Recuperating from an injury, anti-establishment novelist June Leigh (Naomi Watts) is confined to her Bronx apartment. Her rear window looks out onto a street and several businesses. During a powerful heatwave, she watches life down below. If it sounds like I’m just rephrasing the Wikipedia synopsis of Rear Window you would be absolutely right. Alistair Banks Griffin’s latest thriller, The Wolf Hour, is quite similar in many respects to the Hitchcock masterpiece. But unlike James Stewart’s L.B. Jefferies, June isn’t confined to her apartment due to a physical injury. It’s something much more serious than that. It’s an injury of the mind, a past heartbreaking event that traumatized her so badly that she is no longer willing to go outside.

June’s first novel, The Patriarch, was met with much acclaim but is notorious for the tragic, deadly consequence it would have on her life and her family. In the aftermath, she believes that if she stays cooped up in her apartment forever then she won’t be able to do any more damage outside. Griffin provides us a window into June’s life, while all she can do is look out hers. It’s the heatwave of 1977. Her small, sweltering apartment is littered with cigarette butts, used tissues and piles of books that cover the floor. Her fridge is empty and the garbage she refuses to take out is starting to attract flies. On top of all this filth, she’s being harassed by the piercing sound of her apartment buzzer. This sound will become etched in your memory as it happens several times a day and several times a night. June reports the harassment to the police, but they don’t take her seriously. No one ever speaks on the other end, like the silent call of a serial killer, but she can’t step past the threshold of her front door to see who it is. 

Naomi Watts stares into the camera with crying eyes; this is a woman trapped. And throughout the course of the film, she inches closer and closer to getting out. Along with Rear Window, another reminiscent work was caught, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, a short story of a woman trapped in a room with her depression as she begins to see another woman trapped behind the room’s yellow wallpaper. She claws at it until there’s none left and the woman is free. June is, too, clawing at her surroundings, trying to find the woman she once was beneath. She must inspire herself to write again in order to survive. 

Watts’s performance, Khalid Mohtaseb’s cinematography, and Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans’ score are, unfortunately, the only good bits about the film. Personally speaking, it’s the best Watts performance in a long time. Her portrayal of a woman suddenly afraid of human connection, while craving it so desperately, is difficult to watch and incredibly affecting. Her attempts to leave her apartments are the only thrills present in this thriller, as her struggle to walk and breathe is visualized through claustrophobic framing and elevated by an uneasy score. It feels very noir at times with the shadowplay of its cinematography, especially at night when the only light emitted is from the embers of June’s cigarette. But while it looks nice, The Wolf Hour befalls plots holes, with the presence of certain characters left unexplained, and the plot itself, ultimately, leaves much to be desired in its thinness.  

The Wolf Hour is a thriller without many thrills, as June’s mysterious tormentor is somehow forgotten about. June’s sister (played by Jennifer Ehle) remarks, “This thing...it’s all in your head.” In the case of the buzzing, it should have been. The plot would have had more substance in that case. If June was tormented by a presence that no one else could hear, then the film would have held some kind of deeper meaning, like the woman behind the yellow wallpaper that’s not actually there. Naomi Watts deserves better and I’m tired of saying it.