Directed by: Michael Mohan
Starring: Sydney Sweeney, Justice Smith, Natasha Liu Bordizzo, Ben Hardy
You can watch this movie if you don’t have anything better to watch on any weekday night- just to fill the empty space.
The film is not that horrible and is somewhat watchable. Also you will see some not so terrible erotic scenes and few sexy bodies.
Don’t expect a lot of good acting, due to the lack of talent in the cast section.
The movie is supposed to be a kind of psychological drama dealing with a major issue in today’s complex and complicated world: privacy. And not just privacy as an IT problem, privacy as a real, face to face problem where everyone can get into somebody else’s lives with a simple look through the window.
This theme is not new, as you know. Since “Rear window,” we’ve seen numerous variations on this same idea. Modern cities are built in a way where congested multi-story buildings are sometimes too close one to another so a “social distanced” view is impossible. Like it or not, just one glance through the window and you already know what your neighbour is having for dinner.
The main character Pippa (played by Sydney Sweeney), is an optometrist-technician. She and her boyfriend (played by Justice Smithe) move into a new apartment. Across from them is a building where a couple lives on the same floor. The neighbours from across the street are not big fans of curtains or blinds, so whatever they do at home is totally exposed to the view of everybody from the other side of the street. And those two are doing lots of very attractive and “spicy” acts, exposing the more erotic parts of their lives. So, Pippa’s voyeurism is a result of attraction. In the beginning it was just fun, but later on things get far more serious and stressful. The whole show was a trap (as many of you could have predicted) but the outcome is tragic, and Pippa’s revenge is incredibly cruel.
The musical theme is an artificial version of Billy Idol’s “Eyes without the face,” but the real ending of the deadly game could be called, actually “Face without the eyes.”
The twist of events in the movie is a good attempt to make things interesting. Now, the directorial realization of that is somewhat clumsy. It should be razor sharp, dramatic, and produce the maximum level of suspense- but does not. The action is missing momentum in the crucial moments. That’s too bad. A more inventive director would have been able to “suck up” much more juice from that twist. In this case, everything ends cruelly but very dry, without hitting the right note.
The movie is a low budget project, but has decent production design. It’s all clean and nice: the direction of the photography is just on a passable level. There are not too many unnecessary scenes, so the movie is compact enough from that aspect.
Director missed the chance for a much better final product.
And the chance was just here- right in front of your eyes (without the face).
