The Desperate Hour, review: Naomi Watts’s school-shooting drama gets lost in the woods

The nicest thing you can say about The Desperate Hour is that it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. The time, specifically, was September 2020, when the film industry was inching back to work after six months of locked-down stasis. Productions that required only skeleton casts and crews and outdoor locations were the easiest to get underway, and this pared-down thriller written by Chris Sparling – whose screenplay for Buried trapped Ryan Reynolds in a crate for an hour and a half, God bless it – ticked all the boxes.

There’s arguably some promise in its premise, which sends an overworked and recently widowed mother (Naomi Watts) on a notionally relaxing jog through a picturesque forest, only for a shooting to erupt at the school attended by her teenage son (Colton Gobbo), then has her scamper to the rescue while getting abreast of the situation in a series of frantic mobile calls. Think of it as a sort of low-emissions spin on Stephen Knight’s Locke, which had Tom Hardy driving down the M40 at night while reedily holding forth on infidelity and concrete.

Except on reflection, perhaps don’t think that at all. Locke’s tense and intriguing carphone contretemps were mini-masterclasses in slow-burn revelation, but the conversations in The Desperate Hour are almost all plot-delivery vehicles: it’s like a group of unseen characters are watching the real film happening miles away and taking it in turns to tell Watts’s Amy Carr what’s going on in it.

Voices on the other end of the line include another mother already at the police cordon, an employee at the garage over the road from the school who provides eyewitness updates, a lost minicab driver, a police detective on the scene, and an emergency services dispatcher who apparently has the time and inclination, during an active school shooting, to buoy Amy’s spirits with regular you-go-girl pep talks.

Content-wise, some of these chats are more plausible than others, but none ring true as performance. The two sides of the calls rarely mesh or flow like talk between real human beings: whether the issue is writing or sound editing or a combination of both, lots of scenes really do just look like Naomi Watts in the woods monologuing off the top of her head into an iPhone, occasionally leaving a gap into which her scene partners’ words will later be gabbled. As for the plot, a dark twist is flirted with, but you can tell straight away the film’s heart isn’t in it, while a preposterous later one – Watts’s remote-working skills turn out to extend to amateur hostage negotiation – only underscores the daftness of the conceit.

At least Watts’s bright-eyed charisma and obvious commitment passes the time – while director Phillip Noyce, who also had Angelina Jolie running for her life in 2010’s Salt, does his best to keep things visually fresh. But no matter what desperate drama’s playing out in the script, there are only so many angles on a blonde woman on leafy jogging trails you can feasibly get through before your film starts to resemble a feature-length Center Parcs ad.

No cert, 84 mins. Dir: Phillip Noyce. On Sky Cinema and NOW from today