The Desperate Hour: Naomi Watts and Her iPhone Jog Through a School Shooting Drama

By Liam Lacey

Rating: C

The new Naomi Watts film The Desperate Hour is a school shooting dram unfolding from the perspective of a mother taking a run in the woods, trying to use her iPhone to know whether her son is living or dead. Unfolding more or less in real time, with Watts mostly onscreen by herself, it’s a high-concept narrative approach to a nightmarish reality.

Writer Chris Sparling has pursued a similar idea in his 2010 film Buried, which starred Ryan Reynolds as a soldier trapped in a coffin in Iraq with his Blackberry. But today’s iPhone has many more applications —music, Instagram, Lyft, GPS, Siri and live TV — all of which get employed in this film.

Watts plays Amy Carr, whose husband died in a car accident a year before. She has an elementary school-aged daughter Emily (Sierra Maltby) and depressed teenaged son Noah (Colton Gobbo).

When Amy goes out for a five-mile run, she’s not sure whether Noah’s gone to school that day or not. After she leaves town and heads into the country, she gets an alert that there’s an active shooter at a nearby school. At first, she’s not sure which school. Later, she begins to wonder if Noah is victim or perpetrator.

While trying to make her way back to the town community centre where parents are being reunited with their children, Amy works her phone in all kinds of ingenious ways to find out as much information as possible.

Shot around North Bay, Ontario — and originally titled Lakewood when it debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2021 — the film is directed by Watt’s fellow Australian Phillip Noyce, best known for his blockbusters with Harrison Ford (Clear and Present Danger, Patriot Games), as well as more intimate dramas (Rabbit Proof Fence, Dead Calm).

Shot under COVID conditions, it becomes a film about Watts’ character and her iPhone, with the camera exploring various above, below, and around Watts as she runs through the forest. The trees and the dirt path are picturesque, and the action is not entirely repetitive. Watts grows more wide-eyed and breathes harder as she runs and, at one point, she twists her ankle which means she has to rapidly hobble instead of jogging.

In the film’s last half hour, she climbs into the back of a Lyft ride to take her to the community centre. No fault of the ever-game Watts, apart from her proclivity for mawkish script choices, but The Desperate Hour becomes increasingly improbable and tasteless as it draws toward its climax, as Amy starts playing detective and hostage negotiator, while juggling multiple calls like a hyper-caffeinated switchboard operator.

As the film progresses, the idea of using a school shooting as a subject for a thriller feels deeply ill-conceived, undermining the gravity of the subject it attempts to address.

The Desperate Hour. Directed by Phillip Noyce. Written by Chris Sparling. Starring Naomi Watt, Colton Gobbo and Sierra Maltby. Available on video on demand beginning February 25.