The Desperate Hour
Locke and key, a similar concept. A bit more dynamic, more Apple product placement, but moderately enjoyable. Naomi Watts as a mom is still weird, I watched Mullholland Drive too long ago, it tainted her image for ever.
A grieving bog standard American suburbanite family (minus dad) tries to move on with their life when a school shooter attacks their local school. Mom left on a long walk, for grieving purposes, and keeps listening to music and talking with her friends, including the guy from work trying to get into her pants.
She has a smaller kid on elementary school, and a teenager in high school, and at first she doesn’t even know where the shooting is going on. Eventually the little kid is confirmed to be OK, but no the older teenage boy.
What’s worse, the cops call her and ask for information about medications, guns, etc. She is about to faint with this revelation, but it turns out his kid is the one getting shot at. Big relief.
As with Locke, this is entirely told with phone calls from mom running in the sticks, with a track suit and beanie. There’s only a setup scene at the top and another in the end.
Cheap as fuck, but effective, since Naomi Watts can carry the entire film. She always get saddle with this crap, like The Wolf Hour.
This is basically a theatre monologue in film form.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.