Open Windows

Writer/director Nacho Vigalondo’s film is an über-geek’s wet dream, a would-be hip thriller that takes place either on or via a lap-top with a myriad of over-lapping and inter-connecting screens or “open windows” controlled by an unseen operator (Neil Maskell) of sadistic intent.

Elijah Wood is Nick, an internet blogger who has won a one-on-one dinner with a TV starlet, Jill Goddard (Sasha Grey, the former  “adult” move star from Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience), about whom he runs a fanzine. Or so he thinks until his laptop is suddenly hacked by an anonymous male who tells him that she has cancelled but that he can give Nick something even better – direct access to her computer and phone cameras. Nick agrees but the invasion of privacy soon assumes a deadly dimension.

Of course all film depends on us suspending our awareness of the technology required to record and playback what we see and we do so willingly. Hence no one of a movie about Henry VIII points out that what is on screen couldn’t be happening because film cameras hadn't been invented in the Tudor era.  But that is, at least sort of,  is the problem with Open Windows – it is impossible to believe that anyone could rig up the kind of multi-format surveillance equipment used to spin this web of manipulation, let alone operate it all seamlessly in real time on a conveniently charged third party lap-top. It makes the Moon Landing look credible as it opens screen after screen connecting one location then another in some kind of voyeuristic fantasy of control that is a kind of Peeping Tom for the cyber-age only with Tom/Nick a surrogate for some masked dude with a grating London accent.

If this is all there was to the film it might have been a bit of self-conscious low budget cleverness, albeit somewhat tastelessly so, but there’s more. To whit, a trio of French hackers, reminiscent of the troglodytes in Jeunet and Caro's Delicatessen whose leader’s accent is as distracting as that of the masked dude, who help Nick save Ms. Goddard from said dude in a real world car pursuit with Nick driving at breakneck speed all the while comunicating with the hackers on his perfectly framed lap-top screen.  Or is it Nick? There’s the rub.

If the convoluted plot seems happy to throw plauibility out a window, the dialogue which relies heavily on “Aw sh*t” and “Aw F*ck” responses is pedestrian and as the cast by and large act solely to the camera there is little to sustain in this respect either, with Wood conveying nervous compliance well but nothing else of note and Grey showing skills that largely suggest she shouldn’t give up her previous career just yet.

Open Windows could have been an interesting film about the internet as a medium and our evolving addiction to visual imagery but it squanders that potential with the kind of glib sensationalism that will satisfy only superficial engagement.

 

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