Ostensibly sexy thriller takes too long to heat up
The problem with movies about voyeurism and its moral implications is that, at least in such movies, the practice seems so damn fun. It’s sort of the reason why we watch films — to intrude upon other people’s (cinematic) lives.
Are we really supposed to feel like L.B. Jefferies, Jimmy Stewart’s apartment-bound photographer in Hitchcock’s “Rear Window,” is skirting moral boundaries when we also want to know what Raymond Burr is up to in the apartment across the way?
Pippa and Thomas can relate. Played by Sydney Sweeney (“Euphoria,” “The White Lotus”) and Justice Smith (“Pokémon Detective Pikachu”), they are the young couple who move into the typically spacious and elegantly furnished loft space you only find in movies, as the new Amazon Prime Video thriller “The Voyeurs” opens.
The couple in the apartment across the way also have one of those lofts, but more upscale and even bigger. The rooms and the plateglass windows that border them go on and on, shaped like a CinemaScope frame — in other words, the perfect apartment for a movie about voyeurism.
This couple — we eventually learn their names are Sebastian (Ben Hardy) and Julia (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) — like to have sex early and often, and with all the curtains open. Pippa and Thomas can’t stop watching. For a while, it improves their own love life. The sex scenes are graphic, yet passionless; pretty bodies well-lit going through choreographed motions, like the soft-core scenes in those old Cinemax films. (There was a time when sex in cinema was, well, sexy, but not so much in these saccharine times.)
Then they discover that Sebastian, a professional photographer who has a home studio, has a predilection for sleeping with his models. Pippa wants to warn Julia, and suddenly, Julia walks into Pippa’s optometrist’s office, asking for an appointment.
So that’s the setup of this tamer-than-it-should-be thriller, a slow-moving dud until a slam-bang finale that contains a couple of delicious twists. If only the whole movie had been like that.
The director is Michael Mohan, who wrote the pedestrian script and is making his feature debut after working with Sweeney on the Netflix series “Everything Sucks!” His direction is fine; Sweeney, so good in Amazon’s Blumhouse film “Nocturne,” is effective.
But one wonders how a master of truly twisted movies — say, a David Lynch or a Brian De Palma — would have approached “The Voyeurs.” One suspects they would have a bit more fun and taken us further down the moral rabbit hole. And the sex would have been better, too.