Heavily inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s influence on Brian De Palma,
Nacho Vigalondo’s “Open Windows” goes from crazy to Crazy to CRAZY, but
maintains enough energy and cultural currency to keep the entertainment value
high. It’s one of those admittedly silly films that moves so quickly that one rarely has time to
question its logic. Consider that a piece of advice. If you think about any of
the dozen or so twists in “Open Windows” for even a few seconds, the entire
exercise falls apart. However, there’s enough filmmaking skill and an enticing
melting pot of commentary on celebrity and hacker culture to keep it humming.
It’s nonsense, but it’s glorious nonsense.
Nick Chambers (Elijah Wood) runs a website devoted to his
favorite starlet, Jill Goddard (Sasha Grey), star of a series of sci-fi action
flicks called “Dark Sky.” Jill is appearing at a convention in Austin, where
Nick has been told he has won a blogger contest to have dinner with his beloved
actress. Sitting in his hotel room, watching Jill’s latest public appearance
online, Nick gets a call from a mysterious man named Chord (Neil Maskell). The
man on the other end of the line begins to manipulate Nick, telling him that
Jill has canceled their date before giving the fan access to her cell phone.
They can see and hear Jill’s every action, including breaking up with her actor
boyfriend and going to meet her new beau in the same hotel at which Nick is
staying. At first, it’s “Rear Window” with modern technology—the pane of glass
replaced by a smartphone, the new way to play peeping tom. The first act feels
like a clever commentary on how much celebrities “owe us,” especially in the
era of the hacked celebrity photos scandal.
Then Nick leaves his room. At the end of the stellar first
act, Nick starts running around the halls with his laptop, playing puppet on a
string to Chord’s demands and “Open Windows” goes from thriller to insanity.
Did I mention yet that the whole thing takes place on that laptop screen? Yes,
it’s a series of “open windows,” displaying Nick’s webcam, Jill’s phone cam, a
dashboard cam, etc. It’s a clever concept that threatens to completely
collapse, especially when Vigalondo tries to stage a car chase with this
structure, but it never quite does. Again, it’s the kind of thing that if one
questions with any sort of intensity, their eyes will roll. And yet, thanks in
large part to incredibly tight editing by Bernat Vilaplana, I kept my disbelief
suspended. It’s a gimmick that so openly announces and presents itself that it’s
hard to criticize. As De Palma often did in his crazier moments, it’s a
filmmaker who knows he’s pushing the boundaries of logic but does so with just
the right amount of confidence. And “Open Windows” gets crazier and crazier,
which I’ve always considered a positive thing. I have a much bigger problem
with films that pretend to be extreme than those that go off the rails. “Open
Windows” flies off the rails of logic in style.
Mostly. There could have been a few more believable
reactions by the people involved in this insanity. Nick so openly does whatever
Chord says in the first act that it’s hard to believe he’s ever even seen a
movie much less runs a website devoted to them. (Didn’t he see “Grand Piano,”
another Wood vehicle from this year that featured a distant tormentor and could
be called De Palma-esque?) It’s a product of the plot that Nick openly accepts
as much as he does. As is the fact that Jill quickly follows almost every order. They’re
cogs in Vigalondo’s machine as much as Chord’s elaborate plan.
And yet my problems with the shallow characters of “Open
Windows” are offset by the tight pacing and, even more than that, the cultural
commentary for which Vigalondo aims as a writer. He’s playing with the era of anonymity. It
actually makes sense that Nick would be more likely to trust a voice on a
laptop than it might have ten years ago, given how much we are all living
electronically. The combination of anonymity on the internet with a complete
lack of privacy in celebrity culture creates a fascinating crossroads in “Open
Windows.” How many people out there don’t even want to use their real names
online but expect to know every little detail about their favorite actress?
Vigalondo stages the only kind of thriller he could in this pop culture
dichotomy—a crazy one.
